UFirst United First Financial is one of the programs out there claiming to let you pay off a mortgage in half to a third the time without costing anymore or higher payments.

The way it works is this: You put all your cash into the mortgage, and use a home equity line of credit to pay bills from the checkbook or credit card linked to that account. The theory is that having your available cash on the mortgage balance reduces interest, which is true. However, they don’t seem to address that home equity accounts often have a lot of fees when you use them, also they will charge interest (and usually a lot higher than your main mortgage) for money you barrow from it to pay bills. Also if you don’t have a HELOC there’s fees to get one, as well as credit requirements.

How doing this, especially for people living paycheck to paycheck and don’t have enough money in savings to really make a difference is going to help is beyond me. You see, if your money in the bank is earning 5 percent anyway, and the interest on your home loan is tax deductible, the difference could be just a few basis points here by the time you take the tax break into account.

Now, I’ve never used this system, but if the math added up, why wouldn’t this be a premier mortgage product? Armies of real estate agents would be lining up to help them sell houses, the financial institutions would be ablaze writing these kind of mortgages (yes they get less interest if it works, but they get a lot more business). Can you imagine those Ditech.com style ads saying you can get a loan product that you’ll be able to pay off in half the time?

Why are they and TJ Marr with his living free and clear programs the only two places I could find, and why aren’t they on MSNBC,  Bloomberg, or Oprah? I can’t even find a single post from a person who is using it. If you are going to try something like this, I would take it to a mortgage broker and buy them lunch if you have to in order to get a reality check.

Also, what happens if you’re home equity line of credit gets frozen if your house goes down in value? It sounds too good to be true to me, and if it does live up to their claims, the financial world would be on fire over it, but they are not.