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Tracking Life Insurance

jcdwing

Hello,

I am attempting to get a full financial picture in one place assets and liabilities and I don't see a way to add Insurance so I have a full picture in one place one report. I may be missing something but it is part of the full financial picture and planning.

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Frankx

Hi @jcdwing,

Life insurance clearly should be a part of a good financial plan. And you are probably already accounting for premium payments that you make in Quicken. However, life insurance may, or may not, be an asset that you'd establish and track in Quicken.

If you have a whole life policy which has a cash surrender value - that should be an asset and should be tracked as its value changes. On the other hand, the more frequent type of life insurance - term insurance policies - typically have no value and therefore would not be tracked in Quicken.

Frankx

NotACPA

The Face Value of an insurance policy doesn't belong in Q ... as it's not something that you'll have. When you die, your heirs will have it, but not you.

IF your policy has a "current cash value", or something like that, you could consider including that in Q, but it will require periodic manual updates as Q itself doesn't track such.

DBassili

So on the question of insurance, I have a Quicken Windows US 2020 version and I'd like to include our Term Life insurance policies given we have annual policy fees that we also have to track in Q. While I'm happy to include these policies and track them manually, I'm not clear on which 'account' to bucket them into. Suggestions anyone?

NotACPA

Why do you need to track the policies in order to track the fees (premiums) paid?

Those would simply be expense items, and they don't normally add to the value of the policy itself.

Ps56k2

unless you want to add your Term Life as part of Assets and Net Worth ...
it's just an expense item.. car, home, life -

Scooterlam

As far as life insurance, I've only had term policies (no longer). I record these in Quicken, so my spouse can find the particulars should I predecease her (Account Details>Comments) . So....

I enter my term life policy in Quicken as an Asset Account and set the opening balance to the value of the policy. I set display options of that account shown in the image below. I track any premium expenses in my spending accounts as Insurance:Life category. When I no longer have the policy, I close it in Quicken.

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6031128/uploads/editor/io/cw6sclchyofq.png

This is how I handled term insurance policies.

Ps56k2

Scooterlam said: I enter my term life policy in Quicken as an Asset Account and set the opening balance to the value of the policy.

Was curious -
when you do the Add Account -

which of the icons do you select for the "Other Assets and Liabilities" ?

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6031128/uploads/editor/o8/hp3u0pilbs7u.jpg

Scooterlam

Good question. Looks like Quicken has changed the new account dialog since I last created an asset account for this purpose. Nonetheless, It seems like an asset account is an asset account when clicking through these options. However, I would probably use Property, Vehicle or Assets. They all three go through the same wizard. I probably wouldn't use Cash.

Also, in the opening balance register line, for Category, I just self reference the account.

I've used this approach for some time now over a number of different insurance accounts and seems to have no unintended consequences (yet). Its a good way for me to track financial related stuff yet not impacting the normal workflows in Quicken.