Loan repayments

[Egbert van der Wal]

Hi,

In addition to doing my business finance with GnuCash, I recently 
started to track my personal finances using a separate accounting file 
in GnuCash too.

One of the things I added is my student loan. There is this fancy loan 
repayment calculator that I'd like to use, but I can't seem to make it 
fit the system that the organization supplying the student loans uses.

Basically, they supply me with an amount they calculated in some way 
that should repay my loan after 15 years. If, for some reason, the loan 
is not repaid after 15 years, the remainder is waived.

However, when I enter the correct interest percentage and the lifespan 
of 15 years, GnuCash ends up with a slightly higher repayment than that 
the loan organization did. I suspect that this has something to do with 
how the interest over the loan is calculated (per day/month/year). An 
additional complication is that the interest is fixed for 4 year 
periods, and the current percentage is valid until december 2016. What 
it will be next is currently unknown.

Another odd thing is that if I enter 15 years, GnuCash states that there 
are 179 payments remaining, while the correct amount would be 180 (15 * 
12). And if I manually enter 180 months, it still doesn't compute since 
the last repayment according to GnuCash would be October 2028 while it 
should be December 2028.

The repayment amount seems to be calculated by a function / formula 
called 'pmt'. However, I cannot change this formale. Every change I make 
seems to be ignored if I go to the next screen. I also tried to complete 
replace this formula with the fixed repayment the loan organization 
calculated, but this is also ignored in the next screen.

The reason I'd like to use the loan repayment schedule because it 
automatically calculates the expenses on interest and the decrease of 
the liability.

Is there any way in which you can change the repayment? Or a way to 
change the way the interest percentage is applied to repayments etc? Or 
is in non-standard situations like this my only option to enter the 
repayments manually?

Thanks,

Egbert