Record and track Deferred Financing Card Payments

iNexxFear

Is there any way currently that Quicken can help track deferred financing on credit card transactions? some stores have thier cards that offer 12/24 months no interest for certain purchases. To track and ensure I'm on course I use thier website or spreadsheets. Just didn't know if this was an option.

also some other credit card companies are allowing you to do payment plans with a interest charge per month of like $1.00+ as a small fee when you choose them. I'd love to be able to record these details in the check register and then have quicken offer me additional details for overview when I'm in reconciling or preparing my bills for the month for payments.

It would allow for a more streamlined track and source for this information.

Tom Young

As to the first question:  I think you're talking about the situation where credit card companies will essentially let you "carve out" some (presumably large) purchase and pay for this over time without incurring finance charges?  If that's correct, there's no "build it" aspect of Quicken that will mimic this exactly. 

I suppose one work-around would be to transfer those dollars to a manual Liability Account that you create, and then split the credit card payment between the real credit card Account and your manual Account, but of course all the downloaded activity will still come into the real credit card Account which would mean a lot of extra work to keep it all straight.  This would get even more complicated if you have more than one of these deferred financing transactions going at one time.

Another thing you might try here is to create a unique Tag for each deferred financing transaction and use that Tag with your Categorization of the initial purchase, then use that Tag again with each payment against the credit card, splitting that payment over in your checking Account.  You should be able to create a customized Banking > Transaction report that would show you the activity for each deferred financing carve out you've created, though each report would have to be customized to the correct period and to the correct Tag.  The problem here is that the payment would show up in the credit card Account as a bunch of different payments - one for each Tagged transaction and then one for your non-carved out transactions, so Quicken isn't going to find a "match" when the payment downloads into the credit card Account; you'd have to manually clear each separate payment.

I think it's probably a lot easier to simply log into the credit card issuer's web site once a month after the payment posts to see how things are going.

The same "answer" - more or less - applies to the second question.  I assume the fee (or fees) are downloaded into the credit card Account routinely and that you Categorize them as some sort of Interest or Finance fee, so each would need it's own unique Tag, if you choose to go that route.

iNexxFear

Yes you are correct, I was just hoping for Quicken to offer customers the ability to record and note this. It seems like there should be some way to record this while I know its a banking type function just good to note.

Again If I make a 12 month no interest purchase from a store because I want to defer the payments with no interest today, but then tomorrow make a $100 purchase without that financing it would be very helpful to know and track.

I'm not sure if Quicken would need any special reconciliation process for that to have consumers add this in the process at month end but again since they are the specialist helping consumers with their budgets and numbers it would be an awesome and welcomed addition.

In a way I feel that they could also alert consumers that "oh hey, by the way" only paying $100 this month will be $400 short and cause deferred interest to accumulate to your account. Granted I'm doing this using thier statements but also just tracking on the side quickly using a spreadsheet. I'm just looking to have this all in one place and also record any third party banking companies that offer this at the card level with a $1.00 a month fee possibly automatically because those details come up at the time of deferred finanacing options by the financial institution.

[Deleted User]

@iNexxFear - Setting up a Debt Reduction Plan on Quicken might suit your needs.  Just go to planning Tab and choose "Debt Reduction ".  The total amount would be the amount of your "interest free" current balance and the interest rate would be zero.