There are standard formulas to calculate this, as mentioned previously, I just plugged those in to a spreadsheet and calculated all the interest/principle values and exported those to a separate ledger file. I have a variable rate and make occasional extra principle payments. When that happens, I just update the spreadsheet and regenerate the ledger file entirely.
On Fri, Dec 26, 2014, 18:16 Stefano Zacchiroli <[email protected]> wrote: > 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. > -- --- 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.
