loans from/to spouse or somebody else

[H. S.]

Hello,

CC'ing to the mailing list since it appears the poster intended to
send this message to the list and not just to me.

On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 6:22 AM, David Stibbe <dstibbe at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Can somebody give some ideas how to setup accounts for personal loans
>> to/from a spouse or a relative?
>
> I wanted just the things you described and that was for me one of the
> most difficult things to manage. I handled it as following:

Yup, same here. I have searched google a lot regarding this topic in
gnucash, but could not get much info either. My last resort was to
post here.


>  * create an asset account: assets/money owed to me/spouse
>
> Whenever you loan your spouse money:
> * transfer money from your checking account or wallet (whatever asset
> acvcount the money for the loan came from) to that account
> * when your spouse repays you a part of the debt to a certain asset
> account, note that as a transfer from the assets/money owed to
> me/spouse account to that specific checking account.

Yup, this looks reasonable. On the other side (I am 'encouraging' my
partner to use gnucash as well), I suppose a corresponding account
would be liability/money owed to others/spouse, correct? And money,
when borrowed from others, would go from the this account to either
cash or a bank account or any other Asset.


>
> e.g.
>
> Start:
>
> checking account
> ---------------------------------------------
> start balance : 10000  |
> =======================
> assets/money owed to me/spouse
> ---------------------------------------------
> start balance : 0  |
> =======================
>
> Loan 400 to spouse, paid from checking account :
>
> checking account
> ---------------------------------------------
> start balance : 10000  |
> loan to spouse :         | 400
> =======================
> assets/money owed to me/spouse
> ---------------------------------------------
> start balance :        0  |
> loan to spouse :  400  |
> =======================
>
>
> Spouse repays  20 to checking account
> checking account
> ---------------------------------------------
> start balance :          10000  |
> loan to spouse :                  |  400
> spouse repays debt:       20 |
> =======================
> assets/money owed to me/spouse
> ---------------------------------------------
> start balance :                 0  |
> loan to spouse :            400 |
> spouse repays debt:            |  20
> =======================
>
>
>> Also, how does one deal with a shared joint account? For example, say a
>> spousal couple has a joint account, but money is going in to that
>> account only from one spouse. How does the other use Gnucash to keep
>> track of money withdrawn/used from that joint account?
>
> For this, I simply created an new asset account for our joined
> account. To here I transfer money from my own account  and from
> income/spouse.

Aha. How does your spouse manage this account? If gnucash is to be
used, how would the spouse deal with putting money in the joint
account? Have it as asset in his/her account as well, I supposed(?)

>
>
> These are just my two cents; I am curiouse how other gnu-cash users
> `solved' these two issues.
>
> David
>

Thanks. It was helpful.