In my mortgage I pay interest, principal and escrow. However on the Debt Progress sheet it does not have column for the escrow part of my payment, which means it thinks I’m paying much more in principal than I actually am and the pay off date is wrong. How do I add the escrow portion? I looked in the help but the only thing I saw was to create a new account for the escrow but that isn’t going to really work because it’s one payment. Does that make sense? How do I deal/fix this? Any help/advice would be great!
I don’t use that sheet, but if you created a new account for the escrow you could probably split the payment between the two using the Transaction Splitter in the Tiller Labs add-on Tools menu.
Hi @twirl23. Here’s how I do it.
On the transactions sheet I use the split transactions tool to split my mortgage payment into “Mortgage” category (for the principle plus interest portion) and “Escrow” category. On the categories setup, I have each of these budgeted separately. I have to update my mortgage manually since I can’t connect to the account. For me this means that I add a manual transaction onto the mortgage account (as an incoming credit) for only the amount of the principle plus interest, and the category for this is “Debt Payoff”. If your mortgage is connected to Tiller, then I would split the incoming amount again into an escrow category and a debt payoff category. (Another option is to simply change the amount to only the principle/interest and ignore/discard that escrow amount on the mortgage account side.)
Your escrow is really just another bill that happens to be combined with a debt. If you didn’t have an escrow, you’d pay your taxes and/or insurance yourself, so you’d still have to budget it.
Does this make any sense? I’m happy to answer any other questions if I can.
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