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.
