MyMoneyPicture can be used in a number of different ways depending on what information you are trying to track.
A good example is the different ways you can track your mortgage payment. If you aren't interested in tracking the pay down of your mortgage principal in MyMoneyPicture, and you are more interested in monitoring your cash flow each month, you might just want to consider the entire mortgage payment as a housing expense.
In this case, you would simply add a subcategory for your mortgage or housing expense:
Then add an expense each month for the actual mortgage payment.
And one line will be displayed on the Display Transactions screen with the Mortgage Expense.
However, if you want to use MyMoneyPicture to create a more holistic view of your financial situation, you may want to track your Mortgage Loan in MyMoneyPicture by setting up the Mortgage Loan as an Account.
Then each month you would record a Mortgage Payment.
Which would be displayed as two lines on your Transaction Listing; the Payment Amount subtracted from your Checking Account and another Transaction for the Payment that is credited to your Mortgage Account.
Then, you would add an Expense for the Mortgage Interest, and also any Escrow Payments.
Each Mortgage Expense would be displayed on your Transaction Listing.
And you can filter to only display the Transactions for your Mortgage Account.
As you can see from this example, you paid $890.32 to your Mortgage Account, and after paying your Interest and Escrow Expense, you had a $224.35 left over which would be used to pay down the Principal of Mortgage Account.
If you go to the Display Accounts page, you can see the balance of your Mortgage Account is now $132,318.94, when it was $132,543.29 when you added the Account. The $224.35 reduction in Mortgage Principal is automatically adjusted after the Payments and Interest and Escrow expenses are applied.
The same principal can be used for Car Payments or any other Loan you may or may not want to track in MyMoneyPicture. You can decide to just consider the Loan Payment an Expense to make the record keeping easier, or you can track the Loan Principal each month by adding the Account in MyMoneyPicture and entering Payments and Interest Expenses.
