I think you're conflating two separate things. Saving up for a down payment is not buying a house. There's no property value to account for. Heck, there's not even a property yet: You don't even start looking until you've saved enough for the down payment.
The house purchase is easy: Suppose you buy a 100,000 house with the typical 20% down. That's just DR Assets:Fixed:House 100,000, CR Assets:Current:Savings 20,000, CR Liabilities:Mortgage 80,000. Saving up that future down payment is just earmarking. The easy way is with a sub-account called "Down Payment" under whatever actual bank account holds the money, or maybe an actual separate account. Since it's usually a long-term goal it's worthwhile collecting enough to roll into a higher-interest (yeah, I know, but with inflation picking up interest on bank accounts will come back) account like a CD. Regards, John Ralls > On Mar 29, 2022, at 6:33 PM, Adrien Monteleone > <[email protected]> wrote: > > Tough one. > > The property value doesn't increase because you didn't borrow the full price > and paid cash up front for a portion of it. > > The liability doesn't change because that's after (net) the down-payment. > > I'd hazard either an asset or equity account for something like 'savings > goals' similar to the various approaches for envelope budgeting that have > been discussed here before. > > Regards, > Adrien > > On 3/29/22 8:07 PM, David T. via gnucash-user wrote: >> I would imagine the down payment would go into an asset account. I.e., >> transfer from Assets:Savings into Assets: HouseValue? A down payment doesn't >> go into the liability. It is still your asset... > > _______________________________________________ > gnucash-user mailing list > [email protected] > To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: > https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user > If you are using Nabble or Gmane, please see > https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists for more information. > ----- > Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. > You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All. _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list [email protected] To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user If you are using Nabble or Gmane, please see https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists for more information. ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
