Mortgage payments

[Derek Atkins]

Hi,

"Nils Brouer" <nils.brouer at web.de> writes:

> Hi,
>
> As far as I understand, the wizard allows you to enter interest in %, total
> amount and number of months until payback completed. However, I have a
> mortgage where I know the interest and monthly payback of the mortgage, thus
> the total amount that I have to pay. However, the total number of months
> until payback completed is not an integer, or rather the final payment will
> be smaller than the ones before.

Unfortunately I don't believe GnuCash will let you do this currently.  

> Example: if the mortgage is $100,000 with interest of 6% I will pay $500
> interest per month (initially). I pay another $250 to pay back the loan for
> a total of $750. After 221 months, the mortgage will be paid back. However,
> the last payment will be less than $750.
>
> If I enter the amount of $100k and 6% interest together with 221 months in
> the  mortgage wizard, I get a monthly payment of $748.64. With 220 months it
> will be $750,51. How do I get Gnucash to reflect the $750 that I am paying?

You can certainly do this; the hard part would be getting GnuCash to
compute the Principal/Interest split.

> Also, related question: if - after 10 months - I have some extra money and I
> use this to pay back some more of my debt (on top of the monthly $750), the
> amount of interest to be paid will be reduced vs. the initial plan. Will
> Gnucash take this into account?

Alas no, GnuCash does not.  This is an oft-requested feature.  It would
require a SX-capable function for 'balance-as-of-date' and changes to
the SX infrastructure to do account-level input into formulas and do
real-time computations of those numbers (i.e. the P/I split).

> Thanks in advance for any hint!
>
> Regards
>
> Nils

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-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available