Why don't debt payments behave the same way as they do when I actually pay the debt?

1

I’m confused about debt envelopes/accounts.

I have a visa which is carrying a balance which I want to pay down. I added it and then I posted a payment to it. The payment that I added deducts the amount of interest, only reducing the balance by the principal. So now the balance showing does not match the actual balance on the visa.

Why does it do this? How can I make it accurate? I see that for a debt which you can not add transactions to aside from payments, such as a mortgage, this would actually work and be accurate. But for credit cards or credit lines it seems my choices are to either:

  1. live with it, accept that the balance reflected in Goodbudget will be wrong;
  2. fiddle with the numbers when I do a payment transaction until the amount deducted from the total balance is actually correct; or
  3. List credit cards and credit lines as “pay in full” type debts and continually have a negative unallocated balance.

None of these sound like appealing solutions :frowning_face:

2

If I understand your question correctly, you’re trying to make additional payments on your credit card, right? When you enter a payment, Goodbudget will try to calculate the amount that would go to interest per the APR you entered, and the remainder to principal. If you’re just making an extra principal payment you can change the fields for interest and fees to 0.00 and make the entire payment principal, which should make your balance correct.
Maybe you’re just making a larger-than-necessary payment? If so, you can do the same thing. Just adjust the fields in the transaction to reflect what you want to pay, and the balance will update correctly.
Hope that helps!

1 Like
3

oh! :woman_facepalming: I didn’t even realize I could adjust the values since they are automatically filled in.

Thank you!

4

Yep! You’ll get a warning while you’re changing things, (which is a little annoying but no big deal) but when all the numbers are correct it will go through.