Making an extra mortgage payment

You may have heard that it's a good idea to make an extra mortgage payment in a year in order to get a bigger tax deduction. Wrong! While it works on year 1, the year after that you will only have made 11 payments, which puts you one behind, and from then on you have to make an extra annual payment just to bring you back up to 12, which is where you started. My advice is, don't bother.