Since we are refinancing this month we don't have to make a payment on our mortgage. Our mortgage guy gave us 2 months off of payments since the paper work took so long to go through, so no payment needed for October and November. I have already put half of October's payment into savings and the rest I have sitting in checking to give us a little more flex for Christmas. Finally got our "official" EF account to $1K (we have over $7K in savings, but only $1K is "designated" as EF, though all of it would be used as EF if we needed it). We were also informed that the new mortgage company would be sending us a check for $1987.00, they always make sure they overestimate when they do refinances so when the numbers come back you get money back instead of having to pay more. So we have a check coming for almost $2K, plus $1300 November payment, plus $1300 surplus in our old escrow account that we will get a refund for. So that is roughly $4600 that we will have unexpectedly. I really want to put it against the new mortgage.......but I know that is not best for us right now. DH and I discussed it and are going to put the full $4600 in savings. That will get us to $12K in savings. We know that we will need at least one, if not two new to us cars in the next couple of years. We will drive our cars till they drop, but I do NOT want to have a car loan, especially when we are sending all of this extra money to the mortgage....it would be dumb to get a car loan at 6%+ when we have our mortgage at 3.75%. So we will save all of that money and just start right up again with the accelerated payments in December. Goal right now is for the balance to go down $1K a month, that would mean we will have 138 months left to pay, about 11.5 years. Then I would be 37! I am having a hard time not sending the money to the mortgage, I really don't want the amount of the loan to go up, but such is life. Closing costs and the over estimate will cause it to go up, but it will be better for us in the long run to keep the cash in savings. We will be so much more comfortable, and we will still be putting more into savings while we send extra payments to the house. Ok, I am done with my rambling now.