[moneydance] Home Loan Refinance

[Edward Reid]

At 17:12 08/24/08 -0700, Stephan Cox wrote:
>Any ideas on how to capture the following scenario in Moneydance?
>
>Current Home loan set up as a Loan Account.
>New loan will include:
>     Payoff of original loan
>     All closing fees
>     Some extra left over to be deposited into a checking account.

For complex transactions like this, you often need to set up a separate 
transfer account -- I think there's a better name for this but I can't 
remember it. You can use the same transfer account for multiple 
transactions as long as they are sufficiently separated in time to avoid 
confusion.

In particular, a transaction which is split on both sides needs this 
technique. MD allows splits on one side -- typically what you think of as 
the outgoing side, and always the other side from the register where you 
enter the transaction -- but no way to split both sides. (Quicken is the 
same in this respect. I don't know whether any personal finance program 
offers this capability. It's needed only rarely in personal finance and 
would complicate the UI.)

And a home loan closing typically has multiple inflows -- at the very 
least, your down payment and the loan proceeds, often a tax allowance due 
to the way property taxes get split between buyer and seller, and probably 
other inflows. There are usually several outflows, such as the ones you list.

Anyway, just set up a new account -- the type doesn't matter, since the 
balance will be zero when you finish entering the transaction. Enter 
inflows, enter outflows. In case it isn't obvious, the proceeds from the 
new loan are a transfer from the new loan account to the transfer account. 
IIRC, MD asks when you set up the loan whether to transfer the funds to 
another account, so set up the transfer account first.

A refinance (if that's what you are talking about) might have only the new 
loan proceeds as inflow. However, MD doesn't allow arbitrary transactions 
to be entered into an account set up with a type of "loan", so you still 
need the transfer account.

Edward
-- 
Art works by Melynda Reid: http://paleo.org