On Thu, Dec 25, 2014 at 05:32:36PM -0500, Martin Blais wrote: > If your use case is budgeting, you don't need the breakdown to do that > you know the monthly payment and its impact on the other accounts you > have.
It's tangential to the main question of this thread, but I'd like to mention an annoyance in Ledger's budgeting which I've encountered precisely when dealing with mortgage interests. Maybe someone will have a brilliant solution to propose! Let's assume you've a fixed interest rate mortgage. Usually the amount of money you pay monthly is fixed (say, 1000 USD), but the breakdown of that amount into principal vs interests changes over time (with the relative amount of interests you pay monthly diminishing over time). To book those transactions properly in ledger, you should use distinct accounts like Liabilities:Mortgage, Expenses:Interests, and of course Assets:Checking. The only leg of those periodic transactions that will stay constant over time is Assets:Checking; the *sum* of Liabilities:Mortgage and Expenses:Interests will stay constant as well, but the two amounts will not. How do you do budgeting/forecasting about this in Ledger? Ideally, I want Ledger to only report drifts when the sum of principal and interests is not as expected (which should never happen). But that does not seem to be possible with Ledger budgeting support. AFAICT I can only enter fully detailed periodic transactions, including Liabilities:Mortgage and Expenses:Interests. But if I do so, Ledger will dutiful complain that over time the actual postings on those categories drift over time from the expected ones, cluttering Ledger's output. Is there any way around that annoyance? TIA, Cheers. -- Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . [email protected] . . . . o . . . o . o Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o Former Debian Project Leader . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o . « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club » -- --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ledger" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
