Mortgage payments are completely broken
I’ve spent an entire week trying to understand how simplifi tracks mortgage payments. Why is such a simple transaction so hard to track in your app?
If I make a payment from my checking account → mortgage account, it should simply transfer the funds from checking and reduce the balance of the mortgage by the principle amount. It should then reduce my net income for the month to account for the cash that left the checking account. Super simple.
Instead, mortgage payments are treated as credit card transfers, as in money is moving from one account to another without any impact on the balance or net income. Why in the world would you design it this way?
This method makes sense with CC purchases because there're expenses on the CC to account for the transfer from the checking account but this doesn't work at all for mortgage payments unless I manually create a mortgage transaction every time I make a payment to my mortgage.
Comments
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Hello @H@,
Thanks for reaching out! To clarify, can you let us know if your account is manual or connected within Quicken Simplifi? I ask because if the account is connected, you would not need to enter transactions due to the balance being tracked automatically for connected liability accounts. If you are tracking it manually and entering your own transactions, then transfers are not generally counted as expenses in Quicken Simplifi. If you would like to count the payment you are entering as an expense you would need to use an expense category when entering the transaction. You would create a transaction in both accounts in this case, with the payment coming from your checking account as an expense, and the payment going into your mortgage account with the "Transfer" category, so that your income side doesn't offset the expense side.
We do have a great article on how transfers work in Quicken Simplifi as well that you can go over that may help with your understanding:
Let us know if this all makes sense, and thanks for the feedback!
-Coach Jon
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Thanks @Coach Jon for the clarification and yes the mortgage account is manual as simplifi doesn't import it correctly. However manual vs automatic isn't really the core of this issue as users are forced to create 2 transactions (1 to allocate the expense and the other to reduce the mortgage amount).
As far as I can tell simplifi is using the same methodology (or logic) as the credit card payment to account for mortgage payments. This is simply wrong. It makes sense to "transfer" to a credit card, because the transactions are incurred and categorized on the credit card account.
For a mortgage payment however, there is no "expense" to offset the transfer. That's why all the reports are incorrect. What your product team should have done is:
- Ask users the total payment amount of the mortgage
- Split the total amount between principal and interest
- Create an automatic expense in the mortgage account based on the payment schedule.
This way when the user "transfers" a payment to the mortgage account, it automatically matches everything and all the reports would work correctly including the net income.
As far as I can tell, simplifi is reusing the credit card transfer logic vs. actually building the product specifically for mortgage payments. This isn't just specific to mortgages. The current logic makes managing any long-term liability (auto loan, student loan, etc) a huge pain to manage.
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Hello @H@,
Thanks for the reply! I understand where you are coming from, but transfers as a whole in Quicken Simplifi are designed to be neutral. If you still feel like Quicken Simplifi should work in the way you are speaking of, however, you can definitely submit an idea post that you and others can vote for in the community!
Thanks,
Coach Jon
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I'm afraid I have to agree with this thread. I will wait patiently while you (hopefully) implement this in the future:
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