loan/mortgage repayment via sched xactions: feedback request

[Conrad Canterford]

On Wed, 2002-07-03 at 21:47, Derek Atkins wrote:
> What I forgot to mention is that IPMT really uses the _current
> principal balance_, not the _expected_ principal balance.  In other
> words, if you pre-pay (over-pay) principal, your interest will be
> lower than expected.  This means the SX cannot be run in a vacuum; it
> needs to be able to look at the current balance of the
> "loan-principal-account" so it can compute the actual interest.

This raises issues with the recalculation of things if a transaction is
inserted/modified prior to the instantiated ex-scheduled transaction. If
it calculates everything automatically to instantiate the transaction,
people will have an expectation that it will adjust automatically too,
which I'm assuming won't happen. To really fix this problem we need
"self-calculating" transactions in the register, which is a completely
different thing to what jsleds working on.
Failing the self-calculation idea, maybe some date stored in the account
structure (as KVP presumably) that says "If the user enters a
transaction before this date, warn them that they upset all their
calculations". Would require changes to the register to implement, but
presumably not too hard?

As an aside, self-calculating transactions would allow me to do
something that I have often longed for - self-rebalancing transactions.
Every now and then, I go through and check the amount of cash kicking
around and attempt to then rebalance the accounts to that amount. Almost
invariably I subsequently find a receipt or 3 for cash purchases that
predate the rebalance, and have to try and remember what I change so I
can rebalance it. It would be really cool if I could just enter a
transaction that says "Make the final balance of this account $X by
adjusting it with the appropriate balancing transaction from account Y".


-- 
Conrad Canterford  (conrad@mail.watersprite.com.au)
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