Did I set this up correctly - house with negative equity

[Jeremy Miller]

On Sun, Dec 13, 2009 at 13:57, FireFly <fireflys_98 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> As a followup, what transactions would someone do if they made
> repairs/improvements to a house?
>
> I'm sure I've been doing mine all wrong, what I had done is made the house
> a "stock" (effectively) and then just keep updating the price of the stock,
> but this ran into issues when I made changes to the house because I couldn't
> add another .x of the stock for replacing the roof.
>
> If I had been tracking it as cost I'm not 100% sure what I'd do, I know I'd
> debit my bank account for the improvements since I paid for them, and I put
> that in expenses:home improvements, but I would figure I want them to end up
> in the assets:fixed:house:cost?
>

If you want to count the improvements as part of the house value, then you
would not also count them as expenses.

This is what I do:

Original purchase: Debit House:Cost, credit Assets:Cash and
Liabilities:Mortgage
Home improvements: Debit House:Improvements, credit Assets:Cash

You could also simply debit House:Cost for the value of the improvements,
but adding the additional subaccount will preserve detail if you need it
later.  The parent account House will show the overall value.