Tracking mortgages using a Liability 🏡
How a mortgage is set up and tracked in PocketSmith can vary from user to user! Check out how to manage your mortgage using a liability below 🏠⚡️
In this user guide
Overview
After gaining feedback from our users 🗣, we've learned that there are different ways in which people like to set up and track their mortgage in PocketSmith.
The simplest method is to track your mortgage account as a balance-only account and only track the mortgage payments coming out of your main account.
However, we know that method isn’t an option when the bank your mortgage is with doesn’t have a feed connection available, or you’re not using our feeds feature.
In this case, you can track your mortgage in PocketSmith using a liability instead. Liabilities and assets in PocketSmith are different from regular bank accounts in that they don't contain transactions. In place of transactions, you can use budgets to track your budgeted payments when paying down debt, reduce the amount owing on that liability, and use the Calendar page to make any balance adjustments.
This method is great for
Fixed mortgages
Warning
Managing your mortgage as a liability is only recommended if you’re not able to add your mortgage account as a feed account or aren’t able to access bank files to import into your mortgage account.
Note
If you have an interest-only mortgage, check out our Track Balance changes method.
Adding a liability
The first step when managing your mortgage as a liability is to create the liability in your PocketSmith account. You can do this by heading to the Net Worth page (Reports > Net Worth) and selecting Add Liability from the toolbar
Note
If you have more than one mortgage, we recommend adding a liability for each mortgage you have.
Creating categories
Once you have added your mortgage as a liability, you can start creating the categories you will need to manage your mortgage as a liability 🎉
The categories you will need per mortgage are:
- Mortgage Repayments (expense category)
- Mortgage Repayments Credits (transfer category)
These categories should look like the below within PocketSmith:
Note
If you have multiple mortgages, we recommend creating a separate category per mortgage, with each mortgage repayment assigned to its respective category.
For example:
- Home Loan 1 - Mortgage Repayments (expense category)
- Home Loan 2 - Mortgage Repayments (expense category)
- Home Loan 1 - Mortgage Repayments Credits (transfer category)
- Home Loan 2 - Mortgage Repayments Credits (transfer category)
You will categorize your outgoing mortgage repayment transaction to your Mortgage Repayments category. If you have multiple mortgages, you will categorize each outgoing mortgage payment to its corresponding Mortgage Repayments category.
There will be no transactions assigned to your Mortgage Repayments Category as this category is used to create a transfer budget to automatically reduce the balance of your liability. There will be more detail on this further down the guide.
Note
If you have your mortgage with ASB, your repayments will be split into two transactions - The interest portion and the principal portion. You will need to categorize both of these transactions to the same category.
Setting budgets
Once you have created the categories you need, you can now set budgets on these categories 🎉
Expense budget for the main account:
You will need to create a repeating expense budget on your Mortgage Repayments category reflecting the amount and frequency of your mortgage repayment.
For example, if your full mortgage repayment for one loan is $2500/month and you pay this on the 1st of every month - you would create a monthly repeating expense budget for -$2500:
Note
You will need to set separate repeating expense budgets on each of your Mortgage Repayment categories if you have more than one mortgage.
Note
If you want to see your repayment transaction split to show the interest portion and the principal portion, you can manually split this transaction into two transactions and assign them both to the same category.
Income budget for liability:
The income transfer budget on your Mortgage Repayments Credit category is what will automatically reduce the balance of this liability, showing that you're paying off this loan! 🎉
Liabilities and Assets are different from other accounts in PocketSmith in that they don't contain any transactions, and instead use transfer budgets or a manual approach to keep their balance up-to-date.
When creating the transfer budget for a liability on your Mortgage Repayment Credits transfer category, the budgeted amount should be set to the principal portion amount of your loan. For this, you can take your full repayment amount less any interest - this will be your principal amount.
Under 'Which account's forecast is this budget for?'. This will ensure this transfer budget automatically reduces the balance of the liability for the budgeted amount, each budget period.
Under 'This is a transfer from', leave this blank with no account selected.
Tip!
By using an income transfer budget not only does it automatically reduce the balance of the liability, it also means this budgeted income will be removed from your Earning and Spending chart on your Dashboard, the Digest page, and the Income & Expense statement. It will also be excluded, by default, from totals on the Budget Summary (at the top of the Budget page), and the overall figure on the Trends page.
Making adjustments
As you pay down your loan, the portion of your repayments that are for principal and interest will change. This means you will need to update the budget amount for your Mortgage Repayment Credits transfer budget. We recommend doing this every 3 to 6 months for better accuracy.
Tip!
Repeating budgets are easy to edit in PocketSmith; for more information, see our Learn Center guide here: Deleting or making changes to a repeating budget from the Calendar page.
If you find you need to make balance adjustments to your liability so the balance of your loan as a liability matches the balance you see in your internet banking, you can make these balance adjustments on the Calendar page: Updating the value of an asset or liability from the Calendar page