Loans are an important part of your finances, but most financial institutions don’t exactly make it easy to track the details online. Quicken gives you a way to manage and track your loan information in as little or as great a detail as you want.
Types of Loans
There are ten different types of loans that you can track:
- Auto
- Commercial
- Construction
- Consumer
- Home Equity
- Loan
- Military
- Mortgage
- Small Business
- Student
Some of these can be tracked in greater detail, particularly auto and home loans. It is good to be able to see just how much you have paid, how much you have left, and to estimate additional principal payments.
Since the loan terms are tied to your payment information, all you will need to do is to refresh your loan after making a payment. Quicken will handle the rest.
How Quicken handles the different loan types
One thing to keep in mind is that not all loans work the same. For example, car loans usually have a daily calculation period, meaning that if you pay a few days early, it reduces how much you pay in interest that month. Mortgages are quite different. They are typically calculated on a monthly basis, so if you pay a few days early the amount that goes toward interest really is not affected. Student loans are easily the most complicated to calculate because their terms can vary widely from other types of loans. In general, make sure you enter the values that match your particular loan in Quicken to get the best results.
The purpose of the loan tracking feature is to give you a high-level way of tracking your loans with the amount of detail you want. You can monitor just the balance as you pay down the loan, or you can see exactly how much of each payment goes to the principal and how much goes to other things, like interest and fees.
Overview
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