[GNC] Dealing with escrow account

[Michael or Penny Novack]

On 11/2/2023 12:49 PM, Alan Johnson via gnucash-user wrote:
> Your mortgage payment should be fixed, adjusting one a year for escrow
> review.
>
> You can automate / enter a year's worth of payments from bank to
> mortgage account.
>
> You should also have a the 360 (or other) payment amortization table as
> part of your loan packet which shows you what each payment will be for
> Principal and Interest.  Unless you are paying extra, you can just
> follow that to pre-enter your transactions.
>
a) You are unlikely to receive an amortization table for free (I would 
have had to pay a bit extra for it and that was four? decades ago. Since 
software was how I made my living, I wrote my own program. Note that 
this is NOT as trivial as some here think when the problem is to match 
one done by somebody else. You don't know which of the methods they 
used, where they were rounding, or what the final payment would be (it's 
NOT going to come out exact).  My program began with a standard "present 
value" method, then began some trail and error adjustments till matched 
to the penny what the lender had for the payment amount and minimized 
how different was the final payment.

b) If you DO have an amortization table, ideally you make extra payments 
in the amount of the next principle payment (or sum of the principle 
payments of the next several payments) and then you just cross off those 
payments. In other words, you next principle/interest division will be 
that of the next uncrossed off payment. In effect, you are "buying" time 
off the end of the loan (mortgage ends sooner). This can be very cost 
effective in the early years of the mortgage when interest is a 
significant percentage of the payment.

Michael D Novack