Changes Over Time. How Can I Get Money To Track The Loan ?

Q: I want to add my student loan to Money, but I have a payment amount that changes over time. How can I get Money to track the loan so I pay X amount for Y payments for three different values of X and Y? ie: 10/15/2006 (loan begins) $50.00 for 24 payments 10/15/2008 $100 for 275 payments 09/15/2031 $147.17 for 1 payment

A: -Not as a single Loan Account. At least not easily. You might be able to change the terms on the fly, but you'd have to test it to see if you could do it the required way. It would still make things like cash flow forecasting problematic. I suppose you could use three loan accounts with different origination and due dates. But dealing with the balloon balance on the first two would be problematic. You could also just track it

as a liability account and manually enter the interest expense accruals. When I look at your case, I think it's two loans with the final payment on the second loan being less than the previous ones. That's a lot easier to handle than three fundamentally separate cases. -the terms of the loan are such that an y additional payment does not eliminate a future payment, it just lowers the amount of interest compounded to future payments. I hope that Microsoft realizes this limitation in Money and adds it to the next version. I'm sure I'm not the only graduate out there who wishes that Money would accurately track various payment schedules for student loans.