How to Budget for Net Social Security Deposit After Medicare Premium Deduction

jedazmisc

I am using quicken for windows, release R60.15

I am wrestling with creating a budget, and handling social security and medicare deductions correctly. Illustrated via example:

Say SS income per month is $2,000.

If social security is being received and the recipient is also on medicare part B, the SS administration deducts the medicare part B premium from the SS amount, and the net amount is deposited to the recipients checking account.

Say for this example the medicare part B premium is $200. So the net deposit to checking is $2,000 - $200, or $1,800.

Setting this up in a checking account is simple – a split transaction is entered, with $2,000 assigned to “Income: Social Security”, and $200 assigned to “Healthcare: Medicare Part B Premium”. So the net deposit to the checking account is $1,800. And medicare premiums are correctly categorized for reporting purposes. And the downloaded transactions from the bank match.

The part I cannot figure out is how to get the net amount ($1,800) into budget actuals. Quicken, for income, just looks for income categories, and, since “Income: Social Security” is $2,000, that is what it picks as the actual social security payment in the budget.

What I want the budget to capture as the actuals are the net SS payments after the medicare premium deduction – the $1,800, not the $2,000.

I know one way to get the budget to work right is to make two checking account entries – one for the net deposit of $1,800 (categorized as “Income: Social Security), and the other for the medicare part B premium of $200 (categorized as "Healthcare: Medicare Part B Premium”), but then downloads from the bank won’t match – perhaps manually matching deposits (the two quicken checking account entries to the one download if that is possible) would work, but seems like a kludge to me.

Is there a way to cleanly handle this situation so the there is one entry in the checking account yet quicken pulls the net deposit somehow for budgeting purposes?

Thanks.

Quicken Kristina

Hello @jedazmisc,

To assist with this issue, please provide more information. Are you doing a regular split transaction to document your income, or are you using the Paycheck wizard tool under income reminders to create it? Are you able to include the "Healthcare: Medicare Part B Premium" category in your budget? If you are, then that may be the simplest way to get your budget to reflect the deduction from your Social Security income.

I look forward to your response!

jedazmisc

Hi - thanks for your response. Never mind - it is ok if the gross amount is shown as income in the budget - the medicare part b premium is just a personal expense which is fine (for some reason this did not occur to me initially - I was focused on the difference between what was actually deposited to checking versus what the budget reported, not realizing the medicare premium was in the personal expenses list).