Working with a home equity loan in Quicken Mac

vernea

I took out a home equity loan in 2014 with a 15 year term and I was wondering how I could incorporate it on my Mac Quicken account file.

I had (off and on again) been handling this through manual splits, splitting the payment between an equity account, a declining principal account, and a home interest expense.

The expiration of the loan was schedule to end in November of 2029, but recently I've begun sending additional principal of $350 per month as part of my monthly payment.

I set up a new loan account and it appears to want a fixed monthly principal addition and a fixed escrow amount - but if I enter the current $350 extra principal and the current escrow amount, the home equity loan tells me there's a problem because the loans should've already been paid off.

A long term mortgage is more like a journal than a fixed, static thing.

As time goes on, your property tax and insurance go up boosting your escrow. As you become more prosperous and near the end of the loan term, you want to add principal to just finally get rid of the loan.

Is there a way to set the escrow amounts at various times during the loan, or change the extra principal amount at will?

Also, I screwed up somewhere sometime and the home equity principal account was somehow under Credit Cards as a Line of Credit account - is there a way to change that into a Mortgage account?

— Thanks, Verne

Quicken Kristina

Hello @vernea,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community and telling us about this issue.  I'm sorry to hear you're running into this problem. There isn't an option to change the home equity principal account to a mortgage account. You are able to create a new home equity mortgage account and fill in the pertinent information from the old account. In a mortgage account, there is an option to edit loan and payment terms (near the upper left in the register). That option allows you to add in extra principal and you can also add in extra lines for insurance and tax.

I hope this helps!