Setting up Student Loan and Debts

[Wouter van Marle]

On 11 Mar 07, at 6:17, Michael B. Trausch wrote:

> been using GnuCash to manage my own finances for a little bit now.  
> What
> I have done (and what seems to be the "standard" thing to do) is to 
> work
> in terms of a year.  So, I keep my file which starts on 1-1-2007, and 
> no
> transaction in that file are dated before that.  That means that

I don't  think this is a standard thing - on the contrary. This may 
work if you have only incomes and expenses, it will go horribly wrong 
if you start working with A/P and A/R. No idea how to "roll over" those 
to a new year. Besides that I wouldn't  know why you want to split it 
up in the first place. Only more work, and risk of errors in the new 
year start.

> I setted one of them (at 55%) about three weeks ago or so, and I 
> learned
> that when you do such a thing, for tax purposes, the part that you did
> not pay is considered to be income.

I don't know your tax system, but it makes sense to me. A loan is not 
an income (you have to pay it back; the interest payed may or may not 
be tax deductable), as you have to pay it back. But if later you do not 
have to pay back all, the rest becomes a gift to you, and that is 
normally considered income.

> The hardest part for me was understanding how to keep transactions that
> were "split" among different accounts, while keeping them related.  
> When
> I first started playing with the software in mid-2006, I just created
> different transactions for everything, but that quickly became a pain 
> in
> the rear to manage.  Whenever you have something that is "logically" 
> one
> transaction but several different things happen (a settlement; or a
> regular paycheck, which can be four or five different splits if you
> track everything on the paycheck and not just net income) it is quite
> nice to be able to split them.

As you appear to have many loans, maybe you can use the loan druids for 
this. I've never worked with them myself but I know there are options 
for this in GnuCash, at least for mortgages (which is basically a 
special kind of loan). But then again you can't start splitting your 
files in separate years as these loans will run to next year(s).

Wouter.