Transferring to loans, have to manually split principal and interest?

carlivar

I'm on Quicken Mac 5.12.2 (Build 512.29221.100).

I have a couple loans that are pretty straightforward. One a car loan, one my mortgage. The mortgage doesn't have online sync.

What I've been doing is simply transferring payments from my Checking account over to the Loan accounts. However I'm finding when I do that, Quicken puts 100% of the transferred amount to the principal. Quicken knows what the principal and interest split should be for each month's payment -- so do I still have to split it myself? I'm really surprised Quicken isn't smart enough to see a transferred amount matching the monthly principal+interest amount expected, and applying the split. Can this be done more intelligently?

I also can't reconcile the mortgage balance for some reason.

jacobs

@carlivar Quicken Mac can split the principal and interest (and escrow, if you have it) when making loan payments. You can set the loan up on your own as a Liability account, or you can use the built-in features for calculating splits by setting up a Loan account. Which have you done?

carlivar

Correction - I can't reconcile the auto loan balance.

Michael Jones

I don't know about on the Mac, but on the PC when you set the loan up after choosing the correct loan type, Quicken will go through a set of questions about the principle, interest rate, etc. and then propose an automatic reminder that does just what you are asking for (i.e. sets up principle and interest and changes them monthly based on an internally built payment schedule).  The account the payments are going to needs to be of a type 'loan' for that to work.

One note of doing this, Quicken does a good job with mortgages in getting the amortization correct.  But it doesn't do such a hot job with car loans and others where you end up with carried interest or other oddities that make it tough for the amortization feature to get a correct start date and amount on the loan.  Every month I have to edit my car payments to slightly adjust the split to match the bank.  You can search the forums on auto payments and you'll find lots of examples of people complaining about this. 

jacobs

@carlivar Quicken Mac can split the principal and interest (and escrow, if you have it) when making loan payments. You can set the loan up on your own as a Liability account, or you can use the built-in features for calculating splits by setting up a Loan account. Which have you done?