[Kmymoney] How to handle loans and budgets

[Maximilian Schaufler]

Hello,
I've been using KMyMoney for almost 5 years now, but until recently I never
had to make use "loans".
(I'm using german version of KMyMoney, so I hope to translate all terms
correctly)

Because of the complexity and the missing flexibility I kept away from it,
but now I want to find out if I can use it to my advantage at last.

My case:
I took a loan for buying an apartment.
Right now this loan is a liability account, and I have a category for my
"apartment project".
Advantage:
Payments for my loan are easily and flexible set up as recurring transfers
(they might change often because of my loan interest arrangement).
I can see the real balance of my bank loan account in my KMyMoney liability
account.
Disadvantage:
I can not budget these transfers, as they do not change any category. So my
yearly budget is missing the (big) part of loan payments (which is quite
not what I want it to look like).

Alternative 1:
Using a KMyMoney loan account instead of a regular liability account would
only gain me the automatic calculation of payment and interest values,
right? That is a disadvantage for me, as these values are very flexible, I
don't know which bank charges are part of the loan amount that the interest
rate is calculated from, etc.
Would a loan make any difference regarding the ability to budget its
re-payments?

Alternative 2:
Set up the loan not as an account, but as a category.
This way I would be able to create planned bookings as well as budget
expenses for this category.
But I would be missing the information about my loan bank account balance.

Question:
How do you handle loans and budgets?
Any helpful information?

Cheers
Max
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