issues with the Mortgage Druid

[alessandro basili]

Hi there,

I'm trying to set up the Mortgage payment but it seems the druid does
not want to get it right. My payment is done quarterly therefore I
assume that in the PMT, IPMT and PPMT functions the rate is divided by
4, not 12 and the number of occurrences should be 80 (for 20 years), not
240 (I've used a spreadsheet editor with pmt/ipmt/ppmt functions
implemented and they correspond to the bank overview of my loan
repayment plan).

I edit manually the formula and it seems that my quarterly payment is
registered correctly in the scheduled transaction editor, but the 'i'
value seems to be completely messed up (actually it really looks like it
is taken monthly), reporting a wrong estimate for the principal and the
interest amount.

On top of this my mortgage has started in 2012 and it seems this creates
some issues to the program which does not want to generate transactions
in the past. When I run 'Since Last Run' I get transactions for the
future only, not the past.

At this point I decided not to use the druid but to enter the scheduled
transaction via the Editor myself. The main issue with this approach is
that when I enter pmt/ipmt/ppmt either the 'i' variable is not
recognized or the function is not recognized and I'm prompted for a
value when I hit 'Since Last Run', which defies the whole point of using
the functions!

Just to add a little more to this effort, every now and then the
scheduled transaction editor 'freezes' and I'm not able to do anything.
I'm forced to quit and start all over after having replayed the log
files, which do not keep most of my latest operations on the scheduled
transaction editor...

Any ideas how to get it right?
Thanks in advance,

Al