Mortgage
Tracking mortgage is always painful, because of the fluctuation of interest rate. There will never be an easy way to do it, even at AccPal.com. To prevent having complex interface, we do not try to impose a different functions for mortgage, meaning we don't have the expected payment, current interest rate, and princple information. We feel that users are already getting those infomation from their monthly statement, it makes no sense for us to repeat the process. It's more important for us to focus on how much money we pay for the mortgage.
Method 1 - Using tag
Perhaps the easiest way to track mortgage is to treat it like normal expense and track it with tag:
Now we can start inputing transactions, to indicate the monthly mortgage payment:
Method 2 - Using account
a more complicated way to track mortgage is using account, by setting up an account that represent the mortgage. Depending on what we need, starting balance of the account can be overall interest plus principle, princple, or zero representing the amount of money we've paid:
Now we can start inputing transaction, to indicate the monthly mortgage:
Finally we can save it as a shortcut:
Method 3 - Using account for both principle and interesting
If we want more information out of the mortgage information, we can also have two seperate accounts for principle and interest, to track how much princple and interest we've paid so far:
Now we can start inputing transactions, to indicate the monthly mortgage payment:
By using tag report, method 1 will give us the total amount of money we paid, and the number of cycles, it is easiest. Method 2 and method 3 involve using virtual accounts to track mortgage, which adds some extra transactions that are not exist, this requires a little bit more attention.
