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If you’ve been making mortgage payments for years, you may have long forgotten all the bits and pieces that go into that monthly bill. As a result, you could be cheating yourself, paying more than you have to.

One possibly unnecessary expense: private mortgage insurance.

That’s an insurance policy most lenders require of borrowers who make down payments of less than 20 percent. PMI protects the lender if you default. It typically costs $40 to $45 a month per $100,000 borrowed, though you should check your statements, as rates do vary.

A 10-year-old federal law gives many homeowners the right to get free of PMI payments, so long as their loans are not insured by the Federal Housing Administration or Department of Veterans Affairs. The law applies to mortgages signed on or after July 29, 1999.

The lender is required to automatically cancel your PMI requirement when your equity reaches 22 percent of the home’s value at the time you took out the mortgage. Equity is the difference between the property value and the remaining balance on the loan.

If you request it, the lender must cancel your PMI when the equity reaches 20 percent of that original value.

Many lenders will cancel PMI on request even if the mortgage is too old to be covered by the law. And you might get a lender to drop the requirement if you can show that you have at least 20 percent equity based on the home’s current value, rather than the original value. That could allow you to get free of PMI payments years earlier if the value has gone up.

If you bought a $200,000 home with $10,000 down, you started with 5 percent equity. Once your payments have whittled the debt to $160,000 you can request PMI be cancelled. As soon as the debt falls to $156,000 the lender should automatically drop the PMI requirement.

Suppose the home’s value has risen to $220,000. You could request PMI cancellation as soon as your loan balance falls to $176,000.

The lender can tell you your loan balance, and it should be included in the annual statement that comes every January.

If you are curious about how much longer it will take to get to 20 or 22 percent equity with a fixed-rate mortgage, use the Mortgage Loan Calculator. Figure what your balance has to be to make you eligible to cancel, then click the “View Report” button and scan down the “Ending Principal Balance” column.

You can find the exact month you will qualify by clicking the box labeled “Report amortization schedule by month.”

Also keep in mind you can become eligible faster by making extra principal payments, so it’s worth experimenting with numbers in the “Prepayments” boxes.

Forecasting the eligibility date for PMI cancellation is not as precise if you have an adjustable-rate mortgage, since your payments to principal vary as the interest rate changes. But you can get a rough idea with the Adjustable Rate Mortgage Calculator.

To convince a lender to drop the PMI requirement based on the home’s current value, you may have to get a professional appraisal. Before spending hundreds of dollars, get a sense of the current value with the tools offered by Zillow and the National Association of Realtors.

What if you have to continue paying PMI? It could pay to shop around for a cheaper deal. Major firms include United Guaranty (Stock Quote: AIG) and Radian Group (Stock Quote: RDN), and you can find others by typing “private mortgage insurers” into your browser.

— For more ways to save, spend, invest and borrow, visit MainStreet.com.