Fixed escrow amount

[Tommy Trussell]

[I reformatted your question to bottom-post it. Sorry if I lost something.]

> On Sun, May 3, 2009 at 10:41 AM, Mike or Penny Novack
> <stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com> wrote:
>> abdon wrote:
>>>
>>> My bank calculates my escrow amount once a year. Simply put; if my loan
>>> monthly interest/principal payment is $1,000 a month, and escrow is
>>> another
>>> $200, how do I set it up so GNUCash
>>>
>>
>> This would be an asset type account. It's just as if you had a special bank
>> account into which you made periodic payments and once a year an amount of
>> interest and from which were made periodic payments for taxes, fire
>> insurance, etc.

On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 7:21 AM, Abdon Gonzalez <abdon.gonzalez at gmail.com> wrote:
> I created the escrow account, but can't find a place to put the amount
> that will be added to the monthly payment.
>
> Here is a screen shot from the scheduled transactions editor:
>
> http://www.sillypages.com/tempo/screenshot.png

Two observations --

1) After a short time I gave up on having the scheduled transactions
system calculate my principal and interest amounts -- I believe it
cannot handle things like additional principal payments, for instance,
which I did every month (until I paid off the mortgage). What I did
was pick a set of numbers that added up to the correct total and every
time the mortgage company sent a statement (once a quarter) I adjusted
the register numbers in GnuCash to reflect what the mortgage company
calculated for principal and interest.

2) It looks like you have the scheduled transaction editor create more
than one transaction from your bank account each time. You might save
yourself some grief if you make sure it looks as you see it on YOUR
end -- does the mortgage company draft your bank account separately
for the escrow? Then it WOULD be a separate transaction. If (as mine
did) they only draft your bank account once, then make a single
transaction from your bank account, and add a split to transfer the
escrow amount from your bank to Assets:Current Assets:Mortgage Escrow
(or whatever you named it) in addition to the principal and interest
splits. Since the escrow account will vary once or twice a year to
match your escrow expenses, just edit the scheduled transaction when
you get notified of a change, and fix any past ones that get entered
wrong when you get the statement.

I hope I wrote that in a way that makes sense.