If you haven’t heard of “mortgage acceleration” yet, you will soon. It’s spreading across the country (and to some extent internationally) like a slow-burning grass fire. When it reaches the hills and the winds pick up, the flames will jump 100 feet into the air.

Mortgage acceleration is technically any method or technique that gets you to pay off your mortgage principal sooner than scheduled on your 30- or 15-year note. However, most people use the term to refer to a single technique that relies on the equity in your home to acquire a lump sum to apply toward mortgage equity. In effect, by recycling your capital, you are reusing the same money you made payments with the first time, only this time to make a balloon payment.

Aside from the cleverness of using the same dollars twice, this technique also pays off the mortgage interest at an inspiring rate. I used equity cycles four times in a 2 year period, using only $5000 of my home equity line of credit (HELOC) each time. Paying $20,000 of additional principal with the same dollars we used to pay month after month in a more pedestrian way paid off almost $70,000 of interest on our mortgage principal and interest payment.

You can see how following a practice similar to this over a period of several years could completely eliminate home mortgage debt in 5-8 years, depending on the price of the home and the difference between the buyer’s income and typical monthly expenses. .

There are quite a few companies that sell software to manage the stock cycle process. So as not to deliberately leave any of them out, here are some names you might recognize. United First Financial (also known as UFirst) sells a product called MMA (Money Combination Account) through a multi-level marketing structure for $3,500. Sydney Financial Group’s software also costs about $3,500. CMG Mortgage Services sells a similar product; however their website is down at the moment so I can’t confirm the price. Other companies, such as The Mortgage Miracle, represent one of these larger players, in this case Sydney. UFirst is alleged to have around 30,000 independent sales representatives. Norm and Mike, commonly known as “the two guys from California,” sell a software product for $1,295.

Some people are getting the reward of the equity cycle without the benefit of the software. There are books on the subject like “Own Your Home Years Sooner” by Harj Gill and John R. Barker and Lin Ennis’s Let Your Mortgage Make You Rich! There are a handful of ebooks out there that claim to explain the technique, but not all internet marketers are writers, so not all books are created equal.

It could also be said that not all equity cycling software programs are created equal. Although I personally haven’t seen any that don’t work, don’t assume they are identical. Unless they are from the same parent company, regardless of the name of the team selling them, they are not exactly the same in every way.

And if you want to see how much the Equity Cycle software can benefit you, go to http://info.equitycycling.com and click “Free Analysis”. It’s the fourth button at the top below the Equity Cycling logo.