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

Thank you for the follow-up,

I'm glad to hear that the budget is reflecting the proper cash flow!

If you need further assistance, please feel free to reach out!

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).

Quicken Kristina

Thank you for the follow-up,

I'm glad to hear that the budget is reflecting the proper cash flow!

If you need further assistance, please feel free to reach out!