When you borrow money, whether to buy a house or use a credit card to buy a new shirt, the sooner you pay the principal amount of the loan you just took out, the less interest you pay over the life of the loan.

Using the credit card is essentially borrowing the issuer’s money interest free if you pay the bill in its entirety every month. While paying a mortgage is generally not as easy to pay off all at once, there are ways to minimize the interest you pay over the life of the loan.

One way is to take a 15-year fixed-rate mortgage. Interest rates are typically lower on this type of loan, but monthly payments are higher. Another way is to make an extra mortgage payment once a year, and that’s what we’ll focus on here.

Real estate website Trulia notes that there are two requirements for making that extra annual payment. The first is motivation, and that comes from seeing how much more quickly a 30-year mortgage is paid off with a single extra annual payment. On a $150,000 mortgage with a 4% interest rate, one annual additional payment of $716 shaves four years off the term of the loan. That’s worth doing.

The hard part is figuring out how to do it. Here are Trulia’s suggestions.

Review your current budget
Examine your current spending and saving habits and look for ways to make the changes that will allow you to make an extra mortgage payment every year.

Set a reasonable goal
Start with an achievable savings goal and increase it incrementally until you get to where you need to be.

Automate extra savings
Take advantage of your bank’s automated transfer system to put the money into your savings account.

Visit the Trulia website for more details and a mortgage payment calculator.

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