There is a mortgage strategy variously described in different corners of the internet where a mortgage is refinanced... and payments stay steady. For this strategy, a borrower is currently paying some monthly payment, and will continue to pay the exact same monthly payment after their mortgage is refinanced. The benefits are usually explained as an acceleration of mortgage payments and a "guaranteed investment return". You may find yourself in a situation where you are considering this form of accelerated mortgage payments. Is it worth it? Let's run the numbers and find out!

Another week, more featured articles and links.

We're on a roll recently, we cleaned up the front page of the site - let us know if you like the changes and our Twitter follower count is now up to six! (0 to 6 in a week is an infinite percentage increase.)

Writers on personal finance blogs and websites are, on the whole, a frugal bunch. The reasons we started our respective sites are varied - influence, to chronicle paying off our debts, the spread uncommon knowledge, altruism, or merely to build a stage to have our financial opinions heard. Our readers are a much more diverse bunch. While most all people have to deal with their own finances, our readers come to us with their finances in various stages of disarray. While us writers, as a whole, have our finances in order (or at least on the right track), some of our articles tend to preach to the converted. I feel there is an overabundance of frugality articles in our corner of the internet - so I ask, "Is Frugality Overrated?".

Conceptually, it's easy to grasp why and when you should refinance your mortgage. In practice, inertia is the main reason people hold back from refinancing. With that in mind, we present these mortgage calculator which will allow you to see how your current mortgage will compare with the mortgage you are considering. Perhaps if the math is enticing, you'll shop around? Enjoy!

We'd like to thank Hugh Chou for compiling the equations that we needed to create this calculator, and Ironman at Political Calculations for providing the calculator framework.

Don't Quit Your Day Job... is now on Twitter, check us out by clicking this link or the slick icon in the subscribe section. Special thanks to Bret at Hope to Prosper for being our first follower! For the record, the first user DQYDJ followed is Nelson at Financial Uproar. Congratulations, or whatever superlative normally goes with Twitter accomplishments. To the rest of our readers, there is still time to grab one of the other milestone spots like 1,000th reader - or 10th...

Here at DQYDJ we've rambled on recently about the affordability of homes, and even tried to convince you that when mortgage interest rates are low it's not necessarily a good time to purchase a house. We've tried to make the point that affordability in Real Estate seems conditioned on affording payments instead of the actual purchase price of a home. That said, we left our readers hanging by not graphing that affordability with changing interest rates.

For a deeper background, please visit "Rooting for Price Increases and Low Interest Rates" for a description of the DQYDJ Median Home Affordability Index, and "Home Price Affordability Calculator" to play with the affordability numbers yourself.

In our last article, we promised you a calculator so you can copy our methodology and calculate 'affordable' houses by determining what an acceptable monthly payment would be. In our current article, we deliver! Thanks to Ironman at Political Calculations for the calculator creation script, it was very useful once again!

I've mentioned it in previous posts, but I'll say it here again: I purchased a house this year, against the advice of many (and to the delight of a select few). One of the things you will note if you undertake your own house hunt (or you'll recall if you've ever purchased a house) is the massive information disparity which exists between the house-hunter (or seller) and Realtor(s). Even though, with few exceptions, real estate purchases are the largest purchases most of us will make in our lives, transparency is non-existent and bad advice abounds. For starters, and the purpose of this article, I'd like you to consider two statements: "it's a good thing when home prices rise" and "It's a good time to buy now, interest rates are low". Let's consider those, shall we?

Weeks and links for the week - including an editor's pick.

Here's an interesting link, this time brought to you by an Economist piece which asks, "Who are the world's biggest employers?". Luckily, they answer. The top spot went to our own United States Department of Defense, with a whopping 3.2 million people on the payroll.