Managing mortgages within PocketSmith

After gathering feedback from our users, we've learned that there are several ways people like to set up and track their mortgages 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.

Alternative setups include tracking repayments as they arrive in the mortgage account, treating the entire repayment as an expense, or tracking only the interest portion as an expense while treating the remainder of the repayment as a transfer to the home loan.

Because mortgages can vary in how they are structured from bank to bank, mortgage transactions imported into PocketSmith aren't always the same across users' PocketSmith accounts. This also needs to be considered when deciding whether to categorise mortgage transactions as expenses or transfers.

In the following sections of this user guide, we've outlined the most common ways to set up a mortgage in PocketSmith. If the options below don't work for you, please get in touch with some details about your mortgage and how you'd like to track it. We'll do our best to come up with an option for you!

Not sure how you want to manage your mortgage? Take this questionnaire to help you get started 🙌

Head to the Get help tab whilst logged into your PocketSmith account and select the Mortgage questionnaire option:

This method is suitable for:

The simplest way to include your Mortgage is to use our 'Track Balance changes' feature to track the balance of the account. This means you only need to track and categorise the repayment transactions leaving your main bank account, which is simpler than managing separate repayment and transfer transactions.

This method has a few steps when first setting it up, but it will make it easy to view your mortgage repayments as an expense while keeping your mortgage account balances up to date for a better overview of your total net worth! ✨

For more on this method and how to set it up, check out: Tracking mortgages using Track Balance changes.

This method is suitable for:

This is our next simplest method to set up in your PocketSmith. With this, your loan repayments will be seen as a transfer, and the interest on the loan will be seen as an expense 🙌🏼

This method is great if you want an accurate forecast of your net worth that also prevents double-counting your expenses, i.e. the principal payment and the interest payment. The interest portion can be categorised as an expense to reflect the true cost.

To accurately represent net worth, it's best to categorise 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 cause a change in your net worth.

To learn more about this method and how to set it up, check out: Categorising mortgage repayments as transfers (with the interest portion as an expense)

This method is suitable for:

This is our most advanced method to set up that has a few steps involved, but is great if you’re want to see your mortgage repayments as an expense while keeping the transactions in from your mortgage account in your PocketSmith 🎉

This method involves creating filters as well as categories and budgets to track your repayments as an expense in reports and budgets, while still creating an accurate net worth forecast that takes into account the reduction in your loan balance as well as the interest charges.

To learn more about this method and how to set it up, check out: Categorising mortgage repayments as an expense (with the interest portion as a transfer)

This method is great for:

If there is no feed connection available for your mortgage, you can track this in PocketSmith using our Debt and Asset feature instead. Debt 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 debt, and use the Calendar page to make any balance adjustments.

To learn more about this method and how to set it up, check out: Tracking mortgages without a feed

This method is great for:

An interest-only mortgage is different from other mortgage types as the balance of the loan does not change while in its interest-only term 💰

We have a couple of different options you can follow to track this kind of mortgage in your account, which are both easy to follow.

To learn more about tracking an interest-only mortgage, check out: Tracking an Interest-only mortgage