Categorize auto insurance payout?

Just Lurking

Any suggestions on how I might categorize a check from the insurance company for a totaled vehicle? The vehicle is not being replaced, so I can't just "transfer" the payment into the cost of a replacement vehicle.

It's also not income, so what is it exactly? Suggestions welcome!

jacobs

I would probably record it with the category of "Adjustment". That's one of Quicken's special categories, which causes the transaction not to show up in reports as income or expense.

Alternatively, you could use Personal Income > Reimbursement. This would show up in a Category report under income, but would not show up on a Tax Schedule report.

Or you could create your own category. I have ones for Misc. Income and Misc. Expense; I try to use them rarely, but there are sometimes these types of one-off events that don't cleanly fall anywhere else. (Examples: $10 from a class action lawsuit settlement, $15 for taking a survey.) This, too, would show up in a Category report as income. If that would bother you, then use Adjustment to pretty much "hide" this transaction.

Mark D Bell

There are several things you can do to categorize the payment: (1) If you have loan on the vehicle, you could transfer the money into the loan account; (2) You could just deposit into your saving/checking acount and use that account as the category, to which Quicken will confirm that you want to do that; (3) You could have set up an asset account for the vehicle to track your assets and transfered the value of the vehicle at the time of the crash to your savings account.

jacobs

I would probably record it with the category of "Adjustment". That's one of Quicken's special categories, which causes the transaction not to show up in reports as income or expense.

Alternatively, you could use Personal Income > Reimbursement. This would show up in a Category report under income, but would not show up on a Tax Schedule report.

Or you could create your own category. I have ones for Misc. Income and Misc. Expense; I try to use them rarely, but there are sometimes these types of one-off events that don't cleanly fall anywhere else. (Examples: $10 from a class action lawsuit settlement, $15 for taking a survey.) This, too, would show up in a Category report as income. If that would bother you, then use Adjustment to pretty much "hide" this transaction.

Mark D Bell

There are several things you can do to categorize the payment: (1) If you have loan on the vehicle, you could transfer the money into the loan account; (2) You could just deposit into your saving/checking acount and use that account as the category, to which Quicken will confirm that you want to do that; (3) You could have set up an asset account for the vehicle to track your assets and transfered the value of the vehicle at the time of the crash to your savings account.

Just Lurking

Mark D Bell said:

There are several things you can do to categorize the payment: (1) If you have loan on the vehicle, you could transfer the money into the loan account; (2) You could just deposit into your saving/checking acount and use that account as the category, to which Quicken will confirm that you want to do that; (3) You could have set up an asset account for the vehicle to track your assets and transfered the value of the vehicle at the time of the crash to your savings account.

Thank you for the suggestions. Unfortunately #1 and #3 don't apply. I tried #2, and while Quicken let me choose the account as the category, it flagged the transaction in the register with a red symbol which (when I hover over the symbol) informed me that this was an invalid transfer. Not sure whether that would have any long-term implications so I'm going to go in another direction.

jacobs said:

I would probably record it with the category of "Adjustment". That's one of Quicken's special categories, which causes the transaction not to show up in reports as income or expense.

Alternatively, you could use Personal Income > Reimbursement. This would show up in a Category report under income, but would not show up on a Tax Schedule report.

Thank you for the suggestions. I wasn't aware of the implications of the Adjustment category and had completely forgotten about the reimbursement category, which I have used a couple of years ago for similarly unusual and infrequent transactions. I think I will categorize this as a reimbursement, and if the reporting implications end up bothering me down the road then I'll change it to an adjustment.

Thanks to you both for giving me some options to consider!