How to handle down payment on house without showing up as a monthly expense

camner

I want my monthly expense report to show the typical expenses I might incur, including the full monthly house payment (including principle, interest, and payments to escrow). To accomplish this, I have set up an asset account for the house, an asset account for the escrow balance, and a liability account for the mortgage loan.

In setting up the report, on the Accounts tab I have checked all of the accounts listed above (as well as bank accounts, credit card accounts, cash, etc.). Then, on the Categories tab I have included as checked "categories" the house asset account and the mortgage account. (I did not check the "category" for the escrow account because I don't consider the expense made until the bank pays the tax or insurance bill, and I do this transaction manually.) Finally, on the Advanced tab, I have selected "exclude self transfers" from the "Transfers" drop down.

This setup has worked well for me, except for handling the down payment on the house. The way I have set up the report options, the down payment shows up on the report as an expense in the month I made the down payment. It IS an expense, of course, but it distorts what I'm trying to see in the monthly expense report. It's really part of the real estate acquisition, and my expense report shouldn't really show what is an amount unrelated to what was actually spent. After all, the price of the house is the price of the house, and whether I made a $5,000 or $50,000 down payment should make the expense report different.

Any thoughts about how I might handle this?

UKR

How did you make the extra down payment? As a transfer from Checking to the loan account?
If you really want to hide some amount from expenses, you could make two transactions:
In the Checking account recategorize the down payment as "transfer to [Checking]", the name of your checking account register in [square brackets].
This will make the down payment disappear from the loan account so you need to reenter it in the loan account register as a deposit, but categorize it as "transfer to [Loan account name]" similar to the checking account transaction.

In both cases you will be prompted by Quicken about "transfer back to the same account". This is OK to do so in this case.

Now neither of these two transfer transactions should show as a blip on any reports or graphs.

camner

Thanks for your reply! This works perfectly!

Tom Young

" It IS an expense, of course"

Well, no, it isn't.  It's a transformation of one asset, cash, into another asset, a house.

If you did account for the down payment as a transfer from checking to the house asset, simply don't have the house asset selected as a Category in your report.