problem with money debt reduction plan,any help?
Is the Debt Reduction Plan feature broken in Money 2000? It sure appears to
be in my copy of it. If anyone has an idea what's causing it, I'd sure like
to hear it, because it's making the program unusable for a task that is
pretty tedious by hand.
I've liked Money Debt Reduction Plan feature for quite a while. The last
time I used it to set up a plan, I was using Money 98, and it worked great.
A couple of months ago I bought Money 2000, imported my Money file, and
continued working without any apparent problems. But when I decided I
wanted to change the timing on my debt reduction plan, everything went nuts.
Bizarre behavior #1: The most important problem is that Money isn't
prorating payments evenly across the stated timeline. For instance, with
just a single bill in the plan, the payment schedule looks like this:
04/01 110.00
05/01 109.00
06/01 108.00
07/01 1565.00
This might make sense if there were many bills in the plan, but with just
one, it should be an even payoff schedule.
Bizarre behavior #2: Money says I need to allocate far more money monthly
than is reasonable. For instance, to pay off a $5,290 debt in a year, Money
says I need to have $41,837.01 PER MONTH allocated before it will stop
displaying the following message:
The monthly amount you defined is not sufficient to pay all upcoming
debt bills. Money has distributed your monthly payments to make sure
that you can pay all debt bills over the course of your plan.
Bizarre behavior #3: Money is ignoring the date I say I want to be out of
debt. This problem has just appeared within the last hour, while I was
experimenting with it to try to work out the other problems. Now, no matter
what end date I put on the "Define your payment plan" screen, the "View your
Debt Plan" screen shows scheduled payments that end much, much earlier than
the date I choose. It changes depending on what accounts I include in the
debt plan: even if I define an end date of, say, January 1 2002, Money
calculates using an end date of 4/30/2000 when I include one account, and
calculates using an end date of 1/15/2001 when I include three accounts.
It's gone crazy!
Anyone have any thoughts what might be causing this?
_Other things to check: Make sure all accounts are open and under their
credit limit. Make sure all scheduled payments are within the next month.
Make sure that no accounts are amortized loans
_The same thing is happening to me, only my plan insists I make an $800
payment when I've said I want to pay $450 per month. If I delete the
transaction it rolls the amount over into the next (different) credit card
payment. This is driving me crazy. I've tried resetting the debt planner,
but that doesn't work.