Tracking Money in Savings Account

[Mike or Penny Novack]

Ian X Waddington wrote:

> I’d be interested to hear from the core development team…..
>
I'm not a current part of the development team (but this is what I used 
to do for a living)

Even as "personal finance" software there is a great deal missing. 
People have already mentioned (in effect) the vested value in retirement 
accounts but another example needed for personal net worth is accounting 
for life insurance with all the complexity that entails. Insurance of 
the cash value sort, besides being an expense for insurance protection 
is also a form of investment. Can be further complicated by "split 
dollar" insurance in the compensation package.

If the team wants to incorporate "accounting for cash value insurance" 
they'll probably want to draft me for that (since my decades in the 
cypher mines was all in that industry).

Maybe what this project needs is a "user guide". A user guide is very 
different from a "manual". A manual is more closely related to HOW to do 
the various things you want the software to do. A user guide more 
oriented to questions like "if you want to set up "wallet budgeting" 
this is WHAT you want the software to do (and now you look in the manual 
for the specific commands, etc.). So far I haven't had any trouble 
getting GnuCash to do for me various sorts of things "not an intended 
use" but that's because I don't need a "user guide" to suggest the what**.

Michael D Novack, FLMI

* This is sometimes offered by employers as part of the overall 
compensation package. Essentially the company buys a policy on your 
life, pays the premiums on it (most of them, I will come back to that, 
but the reason for the name "split dollar") but allows you to name the 
beneficiary AND when you retire or leave the right to either pay them 
back for all those premiums and keep the policy or surrender the policy 
and pay them back from accumulated policy values keeping the excess. 
What does the company get out of this? Well it's an inducement for the 
employee to stay at least until the policy cash value has become more 
than the sum of the premiums that have been paid. It is always possible 
to consider cash value life insurance as a combination of term insurance 
plus a guaranteed investment account and the "split" comes about because 
the employee is paying that portion of the premium that would be for the 
term component.

There are of course strict rules to limit how much of this you can have 
-- in my case it was "no more than you have bought from us in a personal 
policy".

** Example -- I do NOT use GnuCash for "personal accounting" in the 
ordinary sense but since we itemize, wanted records that would let me 
track donations (keep track of deductible vs non deductible portions, 
whether had donated to that organization this year, how much to 
organizations in different categories, etc.). That's a funny set of 
books that only has "income" and "expense" accounts (this will allow 
creation of the desired reports)