Simplest way to track a 20 year old mortgage when you're just starting Quicken?

karensc7

I've been looking through the community to see how to track our mortgage and I've found a lot of posts on the topic. I don't want to have to worry about when we took out our original mortgage, what the interest is, etc. I'm looking for a simple way to create a mortgage account so that I can see the balance decrease when I apply the principal.

I'm also a former YNAB user & it was easy to do this within the app. I created a tracking account for our mortgage (an off budget type of account in YNAB.) In the checking account, I would enter the mortgage payment as a transfer to the tracking acct. Within the tracking acct, I would enter another transaction to deduct interest & escrow. This would allow the payment to be recognized in full, but the balance would then show the correct principal.

Is there a way to set up something like this in Quicken?

Thank you!

Tom Young

If you don't want to enter any of the details of the loan then simply create a non-connected Liability Account in Quicken and enter the current balance of the loan as the opening balance.

Assuming you know the split of each payment between principal and interest when you enter the payment in your checking account, then simply enter the total payment and then split that payment between the principal portion that reduces the balance of the loan, and the interest portion, which is a current expense ("Category" in Quicken-speak).

Tom Young

If you don't want to enter any of the details of the loan then simply create a non-connected Liability Account in Quicken and enter the current balance of the loan as the opening balance.

Assuming you know the split of each payment between principal and interest when you enter the payment in your checking account, then simply enter the total payment and then split that payment between the principal portion that reduces the balance of the loan, and the interest portion, which is a current expense ("Category" in Quicken-speak).

karensc7

I missed the Liability account when I was looking, so thank you for that!

And I had created my own categories, so I just added two new ones: escrow and mortgage interest.

Thanks for your help, @Tom Young! There is so much to this software, so learning something new is always appreciated.