Loan Schedule View - Why are interests showing for a 0.0% loan?

mrkp89

I have a $295 loan set up in Quicken at 0.0% paying off in 1 year. Is there a reason why there is an interests shown for all the payments made? See attached picture.

The future payments are shown correctly for the amounts paid toward the principal only with the interests being zero.

Maybe I am missing something. Please help. Thanks.

Chris_QPW

P.S. And on top of that neither has an interest payment category.

Normally paying a transaction paying a loan would look something like this:
[Loan]
Interest Category

So it looks like the table/report is taking your second "non interest" transfer as being the "interest category".

Chris_QPW

What is showing in the split of one of those old transactions?  (in the funding account)

mrkp89

> @Chris_QPW said:
> What is showing in the split of one of those old transactions?  (in the funding account)

Attached (anno2.png) is the split view from the funding transaction. I do see that the split to another loan account, $66.48, matched with what is shown as interests.

But I do not understand why Quicken makes this association. I simply was making loan payments to two separate loans. One is not the interests of the other.

Chris_QPW

Now my next question is given that transaction, how did you ever reconcile your account for all these months where you say you paid $24.59, but in the register you have a transaction amount of $91.07?

Frankly I have no idea of how that payment/split got there, unless the loan was setup with some percentage of interest and then at a later time the loan details were adjusted to zero percent interest.

mrkp89

> @Chris_QPW said:
> Now my next question is given that transaction, how did you ever reconcile your account for all these months where you say you paid $24.59, but in the register you have a transaction amount of $91.07?

I can reconcile it no problem because I have two loans set up. For one, the payment is $24.49 monthly while the other is $66.48 monthly. See attached.

You can see that for this loan, Quicken somehow interpreted the other loan payment as interests for this loan.

Those loans were set up with my American Express credit card. They called it PlanIt plans where you do not pay for the loans individually but as one lump sum payment monthly, like a credit card payment.

I wanted to set them up as loans this way to make sure I can track their progress clearly.

> @Chris_QPW said:
> Frankly I have no idea of how that payment/split got there, unless the loan was setup with some percentage of interest and then at a later time the loan details were adjusted to zero percent interest.

Sounds like a software bug to me.

Chris_QPW

Oh, I see now, it is sort of combining the two in that summary table.

I didn't understand that before.

Well I think you have done something that the developers would have never anticipated.  As in you are using one payment to pay two loans.

Chris_QPW

P.S. And on top of that neither has an interest payment category.

Normally paying a transaction paying a loan would look something like this:
[Loan]
Interest Category

So it looks like the table/report is taking your second "non interest" transfer as being the "interest category".

mrkp89

> @Chris_QPW said:
> P.S. And on top of that neither has an interest payment category.
>
> Normally paying a transaction paying a loan would look something like this:
> [Loan]
> Interest Category
>
> So it looks like the table/report is taking your second "non interest" transfer as being the "interest category".

Thank you, your explanation makes sense.

> @Chris_QPW said:
> Well I think you have done something that the developers would have never anticipated.  As in you are using one payment to pay two loans.

I hope this discussion makes it to the developers so they can address it in the next update. These zero interests loans are pretty common and it is not unusual to have several with one credit card company, like I do.

Chris_QPW

I don't think it is the fact that it is a zero interest loan that is causing this. It is the fact that you have used one transaction to pay both loans.  If they were separate transactions it would probably work right.

And given that the combinations would be unlimited if they tried to support this I doubt they ever will.

Chris_QPW

I wanted to mention that best way to do this would be to use a separate account.
As in setup a reminder for a transfer from the checking account for the amount of both of these loans to an "cash account".  This is the one you will match to during the checking account download.  And then in each loan account you use the cash account as the funding account each in their own separate reminder/transaction for the transfer to that loan account.