Mortgage Principal Payments in Budget

ODA364

cannot figure out how to simultaneously apply a mortgage principal payment against my liability/debt balance AND have it show up in my budget. It seems you can do one, but not both

jacobs

You're correct: you currently cannot simultaneously apply a mortgage principal payment against my liability/debt balance AND have it show up in my budget.

In strict accounting terms, the loan payment is a cash flow transfer (decreasing an asset, your checking account, and decreasing a liability, your loan), and is not an expense. But from a personal finance standpoint, a loan payment feels like an expense, and you logically want to be able to budget for it.

Users have been asking for this functionality for years, and the product manager has committed to it and said they are working on it. There is apparently a lot of re-writing of the existing budget code to implement this and other requests for budget enhancements. Until recently, the same problem existed for reports, but they made it possible to adopt a cash-flow view and specify transfers involving selected accounts. That was apparently a required precursor to adding support for transfer to budgets. 

So, to recap…

• The bad news is that you can't include transfer in a budget. You'll have to manually add your loan payment to your budget for now.
• The good news is that the Quicken developers have agreed they need to address this, and are currently working on it.
• The bad news is that we don't know when it will come out.
• The good news is that after years of delay, this seems like something that's likely coming in the short-to-medium future. 

ODA364

Once you effect the "transfer" against the debt balance, it doesn't show up in actuals for the budget as that only includes direct "expenses"

jacobs

You're correct: you currently cannot simultaneously apply a mortgage principal payment against my liability/debt balance AND have it show up in my budget.

In strict accounting terms, the loan payment is a cash flow transfer (decreasing an asset, your checking account, and decreasing a liability, your loan), and is not an expense. But from a personal finance standpoint, a loan payment feels like an expense, and you logically want to be able to budget for it.

Users have been asking for this functionality for years, and the product manager has committed to it and said they are working on it. There is apparently a lot of re-writing of the existing budget code to implement this and other requests for budget enhancements. Until recently, the same problem existed for reports, but they made it possible to adopt a cash-flow view and specify transfers involving selected accounts. That was apparently a required precursor to adding support for transfer to budgets. 

So, to recap…

• The bad news is that you can't include transfer in a budget. You'll have to manually add your loan payment to your budget for now.
• The good news is that the Quicken developers have agreed they need to address this, and are currently working on it.
• The bad news is that we don't know when it will come out.
• The good news is that after years of delay, this seems like something that's likely coming in the short-to-medium future. 

pamela77

This is a valuable post for me. I was trying to do the same thing - have that payment show up in budgets and also go against the liability. So how do I do the cash flow view and specific selected transfers please?

jacobs

@pamela77 Well, as I noted above, you can't do this yet in budgets; you can do it in reports. To do it in as report, use  Create Transaction (or Summary) Report. In Customize, go to Accounts and select only accounts which will show one side of the transfers you want to see; then go to the Advanced tab and select to show only transfers to accounts outside the report.