This column has promoted the idea of mortgage acceleration at every opportunity, mainly because there is simply no better, guaranteed, way to make your money work for you if you are a homeowner with few other assets or disposable income.

The drop of 2 per cent in interest rates in a matter of a few months means that virtually every mortgage holder (except perhaps those on higher fixed-rate contracts) is several hundred pounds better off over the year.

The higher the value of your mortgage and the longer the term to run, the greater the savings. By using the interest rate savings - which is worth £55-£60 a month (or up to £720 a year) - to pay off the mortgage sooner, the result will be to cut years off the term of the contract, thus saving future compounded interest payments.

"Let's assume someone has a £50,000 outstanding mortgage at 7.5 per cent interest. Before the 2 per cent reduction their monthly payment was £450," says Mr John Gilmartin, a Dublin-based independent financial adviser. "Let's also assume they have almost 16 years left to pay. If they maintain their payment at £450, but with a new interest rate of 5.5 per cent, they will end up paying off their mortgage in just under 13 years. In money terms this represents a cash savings of just over £16,000."

The alternative, he says, is to let the £450 payment reduce to £395 (the £55 a month saving) and pay off the mortgage in the allotted 16 years. In this case the total savings is just £10,500.

Since £55 a month is a relatively modest saving these days, Mr Gilmartin believes that unless you formally designate the savings either back into the mortgage or into an alternative top yielding investment, "there is a danger it will just be frittered away. But even if the homeowner in our example were to put the £55 a month in a good with-profits savings policy with an annual net return of 7 per cent, at the end of 13 years such a fund would be worth about £12,000, which is just about enough to pay of their outstanding balance. That is, if all goes well. "Such growth is not guaranteed and the assurance company must return a net return of 7 per cent - after all charges. If interest rates and inflation are maintained at current levels over the next 13 years, one would have to question whether such returns would happen.

"On the other hand, the £55 a month ploughed back into the mortgage would immediately reduce the outstanding capital balance, but it also gives the client complete control over the payment, including the right to increase it, decrease it, stop paying it altogether, add lumps sums, or even dip into it to pay a few years school fees without penalty.

"And if you decided you could even increase the extra £55 a month payment by, say, 4 per cent every year, it would bring the outstanding term down further to 10 years. This amounts to a 60 per cent reduction in the outstanding term of the contract."

Financial advisers like Mr Gilmartin say this kind of exercise is more about financial planning than just about mortgage management, "because it has other implications. For example, if our homeowner happens to be 50 years old, having another 16 years of mortgage payments probably means he can forget about retiring at age 60. By paying off the mortgage in 10 years instead of 16 means he can.

The savings are frankly quite unbelievable for people coming off higher fixed rate interest contracts of 9, 10 and even 11 per cent".

He also points out that the same exercise in repayment acceleration is just as relevant for commercial mortgages as it is for domestic ones, with proportionately higher savings because of the higher values and often, the longer contract periods.