Calculating Simple Daily Interest?

[Robin Chattopadhyay]

Part of the challenge I have found with this situation is that the
principal/interest split depends on when the DOED posts your payment. So,
even if your payment (like mine) is auto-debited on the 28th (or whatever)
of the month, if the 28th falls on a weekend date, the payment is not posted
until the next business day. This increases the number of days since the
prior payment.

I just leave the scheduled transaction with the payment amount as the credit
to the asset (checking) account and no amount in either the Interest Expense
debit or the Liability debit (scheduled transactions do allow unbalanced
transactions). When the scheduled transaction posts, I enter the two debit
amounts according to my amortization schedule and then reconcile it
periodically with the DOED website.

I have an Excel spreadsheet with an amortization schedule using the simple
interest formula that DOED uses; I would be glad to share it with you if you
wish.

Robin

On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 3:29 PM, jldugger at gmail.com <jldugger at gmail.com>wrote:

> I've got some student loans in repayment, and I'm trying to get
> GNUCash to accurately model the principal interest split. According to
> the DOED[1],
> they use a Simple Daily interest formula, which calculates interest on
> days between payments. Is there a way to represent that in a scheduled
> transaction
> template somehow? I scarcely understand ipmt() and ppmnt()...
>
> Here's a schedule to give you an idea of how the split varies.
> Month   Pmt        Principal    Interest
>
> Jan'11  $81.38  $60.06  $21.32
> Dec'10  $81.38  $61.33  $20.05
> Nov'10  $81.38  $59.13  $22.25
> Oct'10  $81.38  $60.41  $20.97
> Sep'10  $81.38  $61.00  $20.38
> Aug'10  $81.38  $58.07  $23.31
>
> This has been annoying me for years, that my number for principal
> remaining and the lender's number never agree. If anyone can help,
> thanks a lot!
>
> Justin
>
> [1]
> http://studentaid.ed.gov/PORTALSWebApp/students/english/MonthlyInterestCalculation.jsp
> _______________________________________________
> gnucash-user mailing list
> gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user
> -----
> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
>