Hi folks, newbie here. I’m confused how I should be categorizing things like loan and mortgage payments? Let’s say I have a mortgage loan with $100k balance. Every month there’s a -$1,000 payment out of my checking account to the mortgage. Do I categorize that as a “transfer”? An expense? Something…

I would say it depends on how accurate you want to be. For example in reality the $1000 mortgage payment should be broken up as principal ( transfer) and interest ( expense). While this is really accurate, This is a bit of a pain. So I just have my mortgage as an expense item and assign the payment…

This might help. B [image] Reflecting Extra Payments Mortgage Principal Payments Towards Net Worth Discussion Hi folks, I’m trying to track my net worth via Tiller. I pay an extra amount every month towards principal when making my mortgage payment. The lender bundles t…

@mmurdock , it also depends on whether you want the mortgage payment to be a part of your budget (if you’re using Tiller Money to keep and track a budget). If you use a Transfer category type that won’t show up on your budget and calculate into your planned or actual cash flow. If you use an expense …

@heather Got it. Thanks! That makes sense. Is there a way to factor end-of-year bonuses into my income budget? I get ~30% of my income in December so budget apps always think I’m overspending month-to-month since we plan on that bonus income for our mortgage, etc.

@heather you stated In this case, it doesn’t matter that the other side of the transaction doesn’t show if your mortgage account isn’t automated. So what if the other side is automated? In my case, I see a ($1,000) transaction leaving my account, and a $1,000 transaction credited to my mortgage …

@aholmes0 - I do not use the budget tools but based on what @heather says above, it appears you will need to code the 1,000 in the mortgage account as a transfer. Blake

@aholmes0 - yes, @Blake is right, you’d want to categorize the inflow to the mortgage account as a Transfer or you could use an income type category that is marked as “hide” on the Categories sheet in the “Hide from reports” column there if you want your transfers to always net to $0.

Great, thank you. Using a transfer category seems to work well.

I am only seeing the gross payment amount coming over from the mortgage account I have connected. Shouldn’t Yodlee or whatever you’re using be pulling the principle, interest, and escrow payments from that mortgage?

:wave: @scottspamkiller ! Generally, Yodlee pulls the transaction as it appears at the institution site so if you look at the mortgage account’s transactions list does it pull those items individually or does it just show the one total payment? You’ll probably need to just manually split that tran…

Confused on categorizing loan payments

Spreadsheets Google Sheets

Topic		Replies	Views
Categorizing mortgage payments (not splitting now) Ask Anything	6	172	March 4, 2025
Dealing with Mortgage Ask Anything	4	370	April 21, 2024
Reflecting Extra Payments Mortgage Principal Payments Towards Net Worth Conversation how-to	2	1364	August 11, 2020
Student Loan Noob Question Google Sheets	5	170	August 23, 2024
Transfers, transfers, and transfers Ask Anything	5	514	November 10, 2023

Confused on categorizing loan payments

Related topics