Setting up a mortgage and transactions entered in arrears (4 numbered questions)

Lincoln A Baxter lab at lincolnbaxter.com
Thu May 5 19:55:23 EDT 2011


Or... you do do something really simple:

Just enter the actually mortage payment as a payment to the mortgage
liablility account, and annually, when you do your taxes, increase the
liability balance by transfering the expenses from the liability account
to the appropriate expense accounts, from the 1099 statement.  Only 1
time per year you have to make adjustments, and you know they will agree
with the bank.

Start with opening balances as of the beginning of the year... forget
about the previous 5 years of history, and the settlement sheet.  Your
house's value probably is not today what it what  you paid for it
anyway.  I periodically just change the opening balance transaction
amount to my assets:home account to reflect the current value of my
home, when want to see a relatively accurate view of my current net
assets.

KISS, don't over finesse... the more you obsession, the less time you
have spending on things that really matter in live.

Lincoln

On Wed, 2011-05-04 at 13:26 -0400, Peter Underwood wrote:
> Thanks James.
> 
> Tommy's explanation of the limits of the Druid (and defining that word too -
> never heard it before in this context and was about to look it up when I saw
> his reply) is a lot of what I want so I can proceed which is nice :)
> 
> To answer your question, I thought I could simply use the Druid to set up
> the mortgage payments starting at that Settlement Statement and let it bring
> things up to date - with manual changes in schedule payments stemming from
> an escrow change. From Tommy's suggestions, it appears that it's easier to
> use the Druid at a lower level than I was thinking. So there really isn't
> anything that I want from the Druid right now that it won't do. Once I have
> completed the setup, if I think there is something the Druid could do which
> would be worth the dev cost, I'll work on setting that out more clearly as a
> wish list item and then see if I can do anything to help with designing it.
> 
> Anyway, for now, the question is answered in that I can move on and stop
> fretting at the Documentation etc to find out what I am doing wrong!
> 
> Thanks again.
> 
> (I am still working out how the transactions end up sorted and balanced in
> the right order if an earlier date transaction is entered later, but again
> Tommy answered that so I'll continue putting in the earlier transactions and
> see whether they sort and balance as I continue.)
> 
> Peter
> 
> On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 9:54 AM, FireFly <fireflys_98 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> > Peter,
> >
> > I think my overall question is, what are you trying to achieve from the
> > Mortgage Druid?
> >
> > I've never used it myself, I've always setup my Mortgage by hand, but have
> > setup both a new mortgage (when I refinanced) and a pre-existing mortgage
> > and not had any real issues, the only "pain" that I have to do is every
> > month I have to change my scheduled transaction to have the correct split
> > between interest and principal, but your situation may be different than
> > mine.
> >
> > Which brings me full circle back to my original question, what are you
> > looking for GNUCash to do for you, what are you hoping from using the
> > Mortgage Druid will happen vs setting up these accounts manually?
> >
> > - James Duerr
> >
> > E-mail: FireFlys_98 at yahoo.com
> > ---------------------
> > Discover a lost art - play Marbles. May 2004
> > www.marillion.com
> >
> 
> 
> 




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