February 6, 2016

3 Little Known Ways To Pay Your Mortgage

Many of you believe that the only way to pay your mortgage is to pay for it yourself, rent out the entire property or rent out a room. What if there was a way to supplement paying your own mortgage without renting all or parts of it out to long term tenants?

Well, here are 3 little known ways to pay your mortgage.

Use Airbnb: You could rent your home as a vacation stay during times of large events and conferences. DC is a huge convention and conference town, so why not take advantage of that by offering up your home to professionals seeking an affordable place to stay. You can also make some income during Thanksgiving, Christmas and the summer tourist season. Homeowners in the city have been renting out their entire homes on average for about $150/night and as high as $400/night. Just plug in “Washington, DC” into the Airbnb search results and you can see for yourself. Just imagine paying your mortgage every month in just a couple of weekend.

Get Your House on TV: Film and TV location scouts are always on the lookout for homes that they can use to shoot scenes for television series, movies, commercials and music videos. Compensation is normally about the amount of your monthly mortgage payment multiplied by the number of days the shooting took place at your house. So a 12 day shoot could pay the mortgage for your house for a year! Why get a tenant when you could get your home on House of Cards? Just list your property on ScoutSource, filminglocations.com or contact an area location scout and invite him or her over for a tour.

Install solar panels: More property owners, both residential and commercial, are installing solar panels on their properties as a means to not only save energy, but for the ROI. In some cases, you could increase the value of your home just by installing solar panels. The costs for solar panels have decreased considerably as investments and subsidies in green technologies have increases. And though the initial costs may still seem onerous for some, years down the line you can sell your energy back to the utility company. Just imagine four years after installing solar panels that you get a check from your utility company for $1000. You can estimate your property’s solar potential here. You’ll have to hurry though, because the Federal solar investment tax credit expires Dec 31, 2016.

So there you have it, 3 little known ways to pay off your mortgage without renting all or parts of it out to long term tenants.