Mortgage Amortisation Schedule

A single "your payment is $2,340 a month" figure is genuinely useful for budgeting but says nothing about how that fixed number is actually composed over the life of the loan, or how the outstanding balance is falling year by year — a year-by-year amortisation schedule makes visible exactly when the interest-versus-principal split crosses over from mostly interest to mostly principal, and how much total interest has accumulated by any given point, which is the information that actually matters for deciding whether an early payoff or a refinance is worth pursuing at a specific point partway through the term.

Because interest is calculated fresh each month on whatever balance remains, an extra payment applied early in the loan reduces the principal at the point where the largest possible amount of future interest is still riding on that balance — the same extra payment made in year 25, against a much smaller remaining balance, saves considerably less total interest even though the dollar amount contributed is identical. The schedule view is what makes this concrete and comparable: it lets an extra payment be tested at different points in the timeline and shows the actual resulting difference in both the term length and the total interest paid, rather than relying on the general rule of thumb alone.