Paying off your house quicker than originally planned is definitely a good idea. But if you think of your home as a way to increase your wealth, that is even better.

Owning a home automatically creates a form of savings for you, but owning a home and using the equity to increase your wealth is a better idea. It is not hard to do. And though it can result in the same advantages that a professional investor has, you do not need to know the complicated strategies they do. It just takes the following two steps.

1. Use the equity you already have in your home to work in your favor. You can use it to pay down the principle of your first mortgage, which accrues on a daily basis, and then get it back into your equity loan before interest accrues on it. This will do two things, drastically reduce the amount of interest you would pay on your home, and also significantly decrease the time it would take you to get out of debt.

2. After using a method like this to substantially reduce the time it takes to pay off your mortgage, you can then have whatever time is left to put into some account that bears interest for you, instead. It takes the money you would have used to pay off your house-and would have only made money for your bank-and puts it into your savings account.

When you think in these terms, you not only avoid paying large amounts of interest to the banks, but you can also begin to use your money (much sooner than you would have originally) to begin earning compound interest in your favor. This is the business the banks are in, and they provide the tools you need to do the very same things. That’s their business! And you can have the same advantages.