Mortgage/Loan druid comments

[Josh Sled]

On Sat, Jul 13, 2002 at 12:08:26PM -0400, Tim Wunder wrote:

|  - The first box is where I'm supposed to specify an Account. Which account is 
| supposed to go here? The loan account, or the account from which the loan 
| gets paid? I'm gonna assume it's the loan account.

Yes, the liability/loan account.  I've changed the label as such in
the Druid.

|  - Can periods remaining be automagically calculated based on Start Date and 
| Length? Ahh, probly not worth it...

Perhaps; it'd be nice, but it's pretty much at the bottom of the to-do
list ATM. :)

|  - In the Repayment dialog, would it be possible to create an account? Not a 
| big deal, but I got half-way thru and decided I wanted to set up an Escrow 
| account. Easy Enough to do from outside the druid, but it would've been 
| convenient to just select "New" when assigning an account to the Escrow.

Yes, it should be possible.  The combo box you're using is a Brand New
Widget I created yesterday ... I spent a lot of time attempting to get
autocompletion working.  The autocompletion works, but it's apparently
impossible in GTK <= 1.2.10 to programatically select a region of text
[like the autocompleted part], such that it should work like the register's
autocompletion.

Now, I think The Right Thing might be to have -- instead of a combo box --
a modal popup of the existing account-selection tree.  Or, maybe, just a
"New" button.  Both, however, are fairly low on the prio list ATM; as
you say: easy enough to do outside the Druid. ;)

|  - It seems that the druid should calculate the payment amount based on the 
| input of the loan amount, the interest rate, and the term. Will it?

Yes; see src/scm/fin.scm. :)  The facility to hook these up to the template
transaction credit/debit cells is there ... but a few more things need
to be hooked up before it will work.  But that's the idea.  As for it
displaying them in the druid... well, I think the formulae would be put
into any "Amount:" entries, but perhaps there's room for an Amortization
Table page... would this be useful?

| - Perhaps the Repayment dialog should display (in a non-editable format) the 
| calculated loan payment amount (principal and interest only), and then a 
| field for each amount checked in the Options dialog. All options with "via 
| Escow account" selected, could be accounted for with one entry field, an 
| Escrow amount. If "via Escrow account" isn't selected, the user could be 

Hmmm... having just one page of amount information, then.  I like this,
though I have to see where it'll fit in.  But it does put all the relevant
information in one place.  I still need to decide what the pre-creation
"review" page looks like, and perhaps this is a large chunk of it.

| prompted for amounts for each individual field. A final calulated field would 
| then be the Total Payment amount, which can only be changed by changing the 
| Esrow amount, or the other editable fields in the Repayment dialog (based on 
| select options).

There was talk about this earlier.  While it will be true for a lot of
people that the Repayment is just the sum of the other splits, a lot
of people just pay something "Fixed" per month [perhaps something that's
calculated and the fudged by their bank, but otherwise a set dollar amount].
So it will need to be edited in some cases by the user.

| Something like (assuming all options are selected):
[deletia]
| if Taxes and Insurance have "via Escrow account" selected, then it becomes:
[deletia]
| if only Taxes and Insurance are selected, and both have "via Escrow account" 
| selected, then it becomes:
[deletia]

I'll look at all this again soon, but it looks pretty reasonable.

| Well, those are my first comments. I hope you find *something* useful there. 
| Looking forward to seeing the completed druid sometime soon... It's looking 
| real promising! 

Thanks.  And thanks for the feedback.

I hope to have it creating the relevant SXes by the end of the weekend,
and hope to get more feedback after then.

| Regards, 
| Tim

...jsled

-- 
http://www.asynchronous.org - `a=jsled; b=asynchronous.org; echo ${a}@${b}`
jabber:jsled@jabber.asynchronous.org, ICQ:4983267, {AIM,YIM}:joshsled