Loans, mortgages and cards
Summary
Section titled “Summary”A loan, a mortgage or a credit card is an account whose type has the
liability class. What it owes is an ordinary
holding: fiat cash, stored negative. Net worth,
its history and every total already sum signed values, so a mortgage of
480,000 lowers net worth by 480,000 with no special case anywhere in the
rollup.
You type the amount owed as a positive number. The app stores it negative and shows it back positive, labelled “Amount owed”.
Account types
Section titled “Account types”Four types carry the liability class: Loan, Mortgage, Credit
Card and Other Liability. Every other type is an asset. The class
lives on account_types.class.
The one place a balance may be negative
Section titled “The one place a balance may be negative”Only fiat on a liability account may be edited below zero. Everywhere else, an edit that would leave a holding negative is refused, and an outflow larger than the balance is refused. On a liability account an outflow — spending on the card, drawing more of the loan — deepens what is owed instead.
Correcting the amount owed is recorded as a correction, not as money moving
in or out.
What debt is left out of
Section titled “What debt is left out of”Debt is not an investment, so any holding on a liability account is left out of Returns (named there as a debt account) and adds no profit or loss: its cost equals its value, so realized and unrealized P&L read zero. It stays in net worth.
On the home page, all debt — margin debt from a broker and what loans and cards owe — is one Debt line beside the allocation, with loans and cards broken out beneath it.
Terms, schedule and payoff
Section titled “Terms, schedule and payoff”A liability account can carry its terms in liability_terms, one row per
account:
- Loan or mortgage: annual rate, term in months, start date, original principal, and optionally the contracted payment.
- Credit card: annual rate, credit limit, minimum payment and annual fee.
From these, Scani computes a fixed-rate amortization schedule, and the account’s page shows the monthly payment and the projected payoff date. They are computed on read and never stored, so changing the terms or the amount owed moves them at once.
Variable rates and a what-if payoff simulator are not supported.