What If Mortgage Calculator not working in Quicken Deluxe

Rede

I just set up a mortgage account attached to my home. I tried to use the What If calculator to see how soon I could pay my mortgage off by adding an extra $100 in principle payment every month. The calculation was incorrect. It did not shorten my loan payoff date. I tried increasing the principle amount to $1000 and the calculator only shorten the payoff by one year. I verified the results with other software and the What If calculator is way off.

jscongdon

I am right there with you.
When I enter in an additional $200 per bi-weekly payment over the next 13-plus years, I have a projected savings of $79.69.
But if I only make ONE additional payment of $200, I have a projected savings of $80.
A few other people have had the same issue with no resolution.
In my case, the account was just imported, so there should be no "corruption." There is a decent bug in their calculations for such a standard formula.

jscongdon

Here's one better... with a balance of $250k, If I pay an additional $100k towards the principal, every other week, it's still going to take more than 7 years to pay off the loan!

Boatnmaniac

@Rede , @jscongdon - Are both of your mortgages connected to the lender or are they set up as manual loan accounts?

Also, which version of Quicken are you running (Help > About Quicken)?

I'm asking because I have several different manual mortgages set up in a test account account and I am running R44.20.  Every test scenario I plugged in returned expected results.  So maybe this is an issue with connected mortgages and/or maybe it is linked to a specific Quicken version.

jscongdon

R46.12 here (Deluxe version)
So, as you said, I added a mortgage manually, and it 100% works.
The account I'm having an issue with was linked via the lender. Figured that would work, bringing in all the other costs other than just the calculated principal and interest. And since I pay extra towards the principal, it should update my balance accordingly.
Programatically, I'm not sure how the application can be confused. It knows a balance; it nows the loan terms - you would think it would apply the same math.

Boatnmaniac

jscongdon said:

R46.12 here (Deluxe version)
So, as you said, I added a mortgage manually, and it 100% works.
The account I'm having an issue with was linked via the lender. Figured that would work, bringing in all the other costs other than just the calculated principal and interest. And since I pay extra towards the principal, it should update my balance accordingly.
Programatically, I'm not sure how the application can be confused. It knows a balance; it nows the loan terms - you would think it would apply the same math.

Thanks for the reply.  I don't know anything about all coding the differences between a connected loan and a manual loan but I'm sure there are several.  Connected loans primarily rely on the downloaded account status information while manual loans internally process everything.  So, maybe there is something in the code that breaks the What If tool or doesn't allow it to complete the calculations.

It could still be a version issue, as well.  I am still running R44.20 (end of Sep 2022) because IMO it is the last reasonably reliable and stable version.  And I don't have any connected loans.  So, my ability to test this out more myself is not possible.

I will pass this thread along to the other Super Users and see if any of them might be able to offer more insight on this issue.