possible to track home equity?

[FRPJunkie]

Jim, is it possible to set up the planner to track a "portfolio" of home equity, as if it's an investment?

For example, let's say I owe $300,000 on a loan with an interest rate of 3%. Is there a way to add this to FRP such that it tracks the increase in my portfolio as principal is paid down on the loan each month?

[jimr]

Sorry I missed this post and ended up ignoring it for so long.

The planner doesn't have any way to track an amortization schedule, so I can't think of how you'd enter that in the planner without some really tedious year by year entries in additional inputs.

Depending on how important the precision is, you could get pretty close with a handful of manual additional input entries, say maybe one every five years or so.

[bryan]

I don't have any Roth accounts or otherwise tax-free portfolio, so I am trying to use that field to track home equity. I set the investment growth to a number that reflects my mortgage payments and standard deviation of zero. This, I think, should model it as just inflation-adjusted with no appreciation (worst case).

I am also tracking mortgage payments as a fixed-dollar cashflow for the length of the mortgage.

When I do not include housing equity in tax-free portfolio, my tax-deferred portfolio shows a value of x at time of mortgage payoff. When I include the housing equity in the tax-free portfolio, my tax-deferred portfolio shows a value of about x/2 at time of mortgage payout.

Any idea what's going on here? I would think the tax-deferred portfolio would remain the same or similar despite the addition of a tax-free portfolio.

[bryan]

I think I have answered my own question. I had the spending policy set to flexible, and the percent of expenses funded is higher with the tax-free portfolio. Changing to spending policy stable better reflects what I expect to happen.

THanks for a great tool. Good for hours of fiddling .