Good point! So what is your story. How did you do it?
To put everything in context, I live in Canada, where 5 year term mortgages with a 25 year amortization to start was the default - these are also known as balloon mortgages in the US. We put down 25% to avoid mortgage insurance, plus 5k because the lender was concerned we had overpaid. Our first mortgage was 5 year fixed (5.25%) on a 25 year amortization, and our second mortgage was a 5 year variable (tended to be around 2.25%) with maybe a 10 year amortization (perhaps 15?).
TLDR: we bought the house with a mortgage payment that we knew we could carry with our existing lifestyle: it was what we'd been paying in rent + amount we'd been saving for the downpayment. We ended up with better cash flow because of raises, and then had some helpful bonuses in the 10-20k range, most of which got redirected to the house instead of lifestyle inflation. I had internalized the script about paying down the mortgage from my parents who did that in the 80s, and at some point I decided I didn't want to have a mortgage when I was 40.
The long story:
To start out, all we did was to pay our mortgage biweekly because we received pay checks biweekly. So 26 payments a year instead of 24. We were also paying back the 40k we had borrowed from RRSPs quite aggressively. I am pretty sure we paid back ourselves before we started prepaying the mortgage beyond the biweekly payments.
IIRC that mortgage provider allowed for a single lump sum payment every year, so after we paid back the RSP Homebuyer's withdrawal, we would send them my bonus or the tax refund as a physical cheque, and eventually through a phone call. We were also putting in the maximum of my annual RSP room for retirement investing, but not the SO's (because they are at a lower marginal tax bracket, so I'd do a spousal contribution). My documentation is on another computer, but think in the range of 5k-15k a year.
After 5 years of kicking ourselves for having a 5%+ fixed rate mortgage when everyone else was seeing interest rates drop like a stone after 2008, we got a 5 year variable mortgage after the first term was done and dropped down the amortization to 10 or 15 years (which was basically the same base payment thanks to the lower interest rate). This one was with a much more modern institution, and we could make lump sum payments or increase the amount of our payment really easily online. My pay switched to semi-monthly around then, so we changed our payments to semi-monthly too, but at a higher amount, so we didn't lose the advantage of that 'extra month' payment that we had been doing. I think the rule was that we could prepay up to 25% annually and/or increase the amount of the regular payments by 25%.
Because it was so easy to do online, we did a mix of big lump sum payments (tax refunds, bonuses, skimming off the top of emergency funds when it felt like we were carrying too much cash), and smaller 200-500 passes when we had more money in our chequing account than needed to cover that month's bills. By that time we were maxxed out on the tax advantaged investments, and putting money into the mortgage was a delay tactic to figuring out what to do with the excess cash.
Now that we don't have mortgage payments, the lower earner puts that cash into non-registered investments. Looking back, we could have made a number of better decisions, but they were the decisions we made at the time, and we didn't end up in a bad place.
