Mortgage Questions -- Escrow handling

[Josh Sled]

On Tue, 2007-04-24 at 17:49 -0500, Tommy Trussell wrote:
> I've been using GnuCash for awhile now... so far so good. (I'm still
> on 1.8.12 in Ubuntu Dapper but I'll be able to upgrade to a 2.x
> version soon.)

You should; it's been out for almost a year, and has some major
improvements.  Heck, 2.2 is approaching! :)


> HOWEVER it's being TOO tricky... The druid sets up the scheduled
> payments for the accounts INCLUDING the Escrow using a formula.
> HOWEVER in practice, I pay whatever escrow amount the bank says I
> should because they keep a minimum balance in escrow based on some
> formula and analysis of my actual property tax and insurance payments
> they pay out of escrow. 

Not too tricky: un-sophisticated.  I wrote this before I had a mortgage,
and thus understood how escrow payments actually work.  IIRC, no one
suggested the appropriate handling at the time.


> I also pay an additional principal amount
> every month, SO the principal and interest will vary more every month.

This, as well, is not handled.  In particular, we compute the
principal/interest splits from the "idealized"/formulaic repayment
schedules, not as a function of the value of the account as of the
appropriate date.  In short: we don't handle over-payments.


> I am probably making this too complicated, and maybe I just need to
> ditch the druid and enter some formulas in the scheduled transaction
> editor by hand. Recommendations?

Use the druid to get an idea of the SXes and (template) transactions
that it creates, then modify them, or create more suitable SXes and
template transactions by hand.  Use ad-hoc variables in the SXes to be
prompted for the correct principal/interest payment fractions, which you
can enter from your paystub or compute externally.

-- 
...jsled
http://asynchronous.org/ - a=jsled;b=asynchronous.org; echo ${a}@${b}
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