Mortgages: Adding your home as an Asset

When adding mortgage accounts or home loans, it's a good idea to add the corresponding home or investment property as an Asset, as this will offset the loan in your Net Worth report 🏠 🙌. This guide covers our recommendations for adding your home or property as an Asset in PocketSmith.

For details on the different options for tracking and budgeting for your loan repayments, see: Managing mortgages within PocketSmith

Adding your home or property as an Asset

1. Go to Reports > Net Worth

2. Select + Asset 

   

3. Select the asset type  Property

   

4. Enter the details of the asset

   
   

   

5. You will be asked if you want to link the asset to an existing loan account or a new debt.

   While it may seem counterintuitive, we recommend you select No and manage your loan accounts and debts as standalone debts. We cover why we make this recommendation here.

   
   

   

   
   

   • If you selected Yes, click on the Save & continue button. You will be taken to another window. See linking an asset to a loan or debt for more advice.

   • If you selected No, proceed to the next step

   
   

6. If you want to set an interest or depreciation rate for the asset, select Yes to the option  Do you want to set interest/depreciation for this asset?

   Otherwise, select No

   
   

   

   
   

   • If you select No, click Save to finish adding the asset and go back to the Net Worth page

   • If you select Yes, click the Save & continue button and proceed to the next step

7. You can then add an interest or depreciation rate to the asset, including the frequency at which the rate will be applied. See: Appreciation and depreciation settings.

   Note

   The current value will override any interest applied between the purchase date and the current date (the date the asset was added to PocketSmith).

   If you'd like the current balance to reflect the original purchase value + interest follow the steps outlined here

8. Click Save and reload Net Worth to add the asset to your Net Worth report

Background: Loan account and Loan Debt differences

There are a few key differences between a mortgage added as a Loan account and one added as a Loan Debt in PocketSmith.

Loan account:

A loan account is a bank account added to PocketSmith that reflects your mortgage or home loan.

A 'bank account' can contain transactions and is generally updated via a bank feed or by importing bank files.

Appears under the 'Your accounts' section of the Account Summary, Calendar page, Dashboard widgets, and Income & Expense Report.

Loan Debt:

A Debt in PocketSmith cannot contain transactions and is added via the Net Worth report.

Debts can be used to reflect a financial liability that cannot be added as a bank account. For example, if a feed is not available, or you aren't able to access bank files to import transactions into your mortgage account.

Appears under the 'Other Assets and Debts' section of the Account Summary, Calendar page, Dashboard widgets, and Income & Expense Report.

Why we recommend managing Loan Debts as standalone debts

We recommend that you don't link your loan accounts or debts to your Asset and instead manage these as standalone loan accounts or debts.

Standalone debts provide more flexibility for tracking throughout PocketSmith than associated debts, giving you the freedom to view the asset and the debt separately or together. A linked (associated) debt can only be viewed together with the Asset, which limits your visibility.

In addition, the only way to unlink an associated debt is to delete the debt, which means that the history isn't preserved. This means that following a restructuring or paying down of the loan, you'll need to zero the debt and then leave it linked.

Note, this issue does not affect loans added as bank accounts, which can be unlinked from an asset without issue.

If you decide you still want to link your Asset to a loan account/Debt

While we do not recommend linking your Asset to a loan account or debt, you can do this if you would really like to. You can link the asset to multiple loan accounts and standalone debts.

If your mortgage or home loan is not added as a bank account (and won't be added), then you can create a new standalone debt.

Note that you cannot link an asset to an existing debt.

See our Managing money owed toward an asset guide for more on managing associated loan accounts and debts.

Help! I've doubled up my loan somehow

If you have inadvertently duplicated your loan by adding it as a loan account and as an associated loan debt, then it's best to delete the associated debt and leave the loan account in place. We have all the details on how to resolve this here: Mortgages: Duplicate loans or debts

Updating the value of your Asset over time

To keep the value of your property up to date, you can periodically adjust the Asset balance on the Calendar. For all the details, see: Updating the value of an asset or a debt from the Calendar page