Categorizing mortgage repayments as transfers (with the interest portion as an expense)

How a mortgage is set up and tracked in PocketSmith can vary from user to user! Check out our Overview guide for information on all our mortgage tracking methods, or continue reading to learn about our repayments as a transfer method 🏠⚡️

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.
Because mortgages can vary in how they are set up from bank to bank, this means that mortgage transactions 🏡 imported into PocketSmith aren't always the same from one user's PocketSmith account to the next. This also needs to be considered when deciding whether to categorize mortgage transactions as expenses or transfers.
One of our simplest methods is to track your mortgage repayments as a transfer, with the interest being an expense, which we go over in this guide.

This method is great for

Fixed Mortgages

Floating mortgages

Offset mortgages

Revolving credit mortgages

Redraw facility mortgages

Note

If you are tracking your mortgage in your PocketSmith, we also recommend adding your house as an asset to make your net worth more accurate. Adding an asset to Net Worth

Categorizing mortgage repayments as transfers (with the interest portion as an expense)

Reasons to set up a mortgage in this way

There are a few reasons that you may want to categorize your mortgage repayments as transfers: 

  • Accurate forecasting of net worth: If your home loan is included in PocketSmith as a loan account or home loan debt and your mortgage repayments are paid into the loan account or home loan debt, your overall net worth doesn't change. Therefore that movement of money from one account to another (eg. from an everyday account to a loan account) isn't seen as an expense, because what is debited from one account is then credited to another.
  • Prevents double-counting your expenses, ie. the principal payment and the interest payment. The interest portion can be categorized as an expense to reflect the true cost 

To accurately represent net worth, it's best to categorize the mortgage repayment into the loan account as a transfer, and then treat the actual interest transactions that are automatically debited from the loan account as the expense - the interest transactions within the mortgage account are what causes a change in your net worth.  

A good way to think about this is similar to how one might treat savings or investments - savings and mortgage payments are actually quite similar! With both of these, money is just being moved from one account to another account and the transfer of savings isn't really considered an expense.

Category set up 

In order to manage your mortgage within PocketSmith in this way, you'll need to create 2 unique categories, for example:

  • Mortgage repayments (transfer)
  • Mortgage interest (expense)

Note

If you have more than one mortgage account, you will need to create two categories for each of your mortgage accounts. For example;

  • Home loan 1 Mortgage Repayments (transfer)
  • Home Loan 1 Mortgage Interest (expense)
  • Home Loan 2 Mortgage Repayments (transfer)
  • Home Loan 2 Mortgage Interest (expense)
  1. Assign your mortgage repayments to your Mortgage repayments category, and ensure that this is set up as a transfer category.
  2. Assign both sides of the transfer to your Mortgage repayments category (for example, the transaction leaving one account, and then that same transaction entering another)
  3. Assign the interest transactions that are debited from your mortgage account to the Mortgage interest category

Note

If you have your mortgage with ASB, your repayments will be split into two transactions for each side of the transfer - The interest portion and the principal portion. You will need to categorize all four of the transactions to the same transfer category

Budget set up

In order for your Net Worth forecast to be accurate, you'll need to set up the following budgets:

  • transfer budget for your Mortgage repayments category
  • An expense budget for your Mortgage interest category
  1. Create a transfer budget for your Mortgage repayments category.

    This will allow you to track your transferred payments and it will also allow PocketSmith to create an accurate forecast of your future account balances. Check out our user guide:  Creating a transfer budget.

  2. In order for your Interest payments to be reflected in your forecast, you'll also need to create an expense budget for your Mortgage Interest category. For detail on how to create a budget see: Creating a new budget.

Updating the expense interest budget periodically:

For the Mortgage Interest category, we recommend regularly updating the budget amount using the calendar page and selecting ' This and future budget events' option when applying any changes to more closely match the actual interest charged for your loan. This way, you can ensure that your forecast remains up-to-date and more accurate.

How this will affect your PocketSmith reports 

By treating your principal Mortgage payments as a transfer, they will not be reflected on the Earning & Spending chart on the Dashboard nor in your overall spending budget at the top of the Budget page. Any Interest transactions will show as an expense.

Users can still create budgets for mortgage payments if they are set up as transfers so that they can be tracked! With a transfer budget set up, PocketSmith will automatically match the credit transaction to the debit transaction (or vice versa) for that budget, which will allow the user to keep track of their mortgage payments, and also allow PocketSmith to be able to create an accurate forecast of their future account balances. Check out our user guide:   Creating a transfer budget.


Viewing repayments as an expense

To view your mortgage repayments as an expense, you can use the Income & Expense report (Reports > Income & Expense) instead of your Budget Summary.


When on your Income & Expense report, you will want to make sure you toggle Include transfers on so they are included in the report, as well as Select multiple accounts, making sure that your mortgage accounts are not selected:


The expense side of the transfer budget set on the Mortgage Repayments category will show as an expense in the report and be included in Total Expense.

Tip!

Doing this will show all your transfers for the accounts selected as an expense on the Income & Expense Statement, but you can hide categories from the report to exclude other transfer categories.

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