"dutchy999" <dutchy999[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:93D688F5-60C4-47DD-B0C4-4F9B29765D8D[at]microsoft.com...
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For transfers to the joint account, consider creating an interim
account to which you transfer money from your personal account. The
reason for doing so is the splits in the transfer out, required for
tracking the details, may be REAL messy. They'll create as many
different deposits into the receiving account as there are splits.

With an interim account, you don't care so much. Just split the
transfer out to the interim account as much as you want. The result is
an increase in the balance of that account. Then offset that with a
single balancing transfer from the interim account to the destination
account. The result should be zero balance in the interim account, a
method of keeping it all straight.

Since a transfer cannot simultaneously track categories, it sounds
like you may benefit from classifications. You have a limit of 2 but,
within those, the subclasses are unlimited. Try to keep the
classification simple, like 'divorce accounting' or something like
that. Subclasses should essentially mirror categories you've already
used, but you can't have sub-sub classes. Nothing prevents you from
naming them something like food-groceries and food-dining out, to
accomplish essentially the same thing.

Keeping the joint account external would be the cleaner way, but I
don't know if that's practical yet. If it is, forget the interim
account. Just split the transfers out using standard categories.
--
Chris Cowles
Gainesville, FL

=?Utf-8?B?ZHV0Y2h5OTk5?= <dutchy999[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote on
07 Nov 2007 in group microsoft.public.money:

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<snip
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You have a good solution for your contributions.

When you write checks from the shared account, use splits to show the
details. For example, if you write a $100 check to Sears to get ready
for school, show splits of $50 (Child Support:Clothing) and $50 (Child
Support:School Supplies). You can even categorize your ex's portion if
you want.

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Just record her contributions as a deposit. You'll be able to verify the
transactions on the bank's web site or by downloading the activity. I
would create a custom category for her portion.

--
Steve B.
New Life Home Improvement

This is going to get complicated.

IF shared expenses are paid 100% from one account, then you can just
separate out that account--I'm thinking I'd spin it out of "my" Money file
and out of "her" Money file and just leave it alone in a third file. THEN
you can use expense transactions in that file and, say, "Other Income :
Joint Contribution (his)" and "Other Income : Joint Contribution (hers)"
income categories. The secret would be to hold, over time:

sum(Other Income : Joint Contribution (his) and Other Income : Joint
Contribution (hers)) = -sum(all expenses)

and

Other Income : Joint Contribution (his) = Other Income : Joint Contribution
(hers)

You could do that with reports and a little bit of math and whenever the
balance gets skewed toward one ex's income, the other ex needs to kick some
in.

In this scenario, the "transfer" out of your accounts/file would just become
an expense category "Joint Expense in Other File" or something.

My bet is it isn't that simple. If you, say, put some expense for a kid on
your credit card but want to get reimbursed for her half, how is that going
to work? See, maybe, http://umpmfaq.info/faqdb.php?q=183 for a general
treatment that may give you some ideas.

"dutchy999" <dutchy999[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:93D688F5-60C4-47DD-B0C4-4F9B29765D8D[at]microsoft.com...
- quote -

Dick Watson and others:

Another couple of questions re how to handle divorce in MS Money

Some background info first

Old situation:

Both of our paychecks deposited in a Joint Checking.

All expenses paid from joint checking.

New situation:

Separation of finances in progress. Each of us has individual Checking
Account set up in which our respective paychecks will be deposited.

Shared expenses (expenses made for the children, mortgage, utilities [the
latter 2 until divorce is final]) will be paid from the Joint Checking, with
each party depositing/transferring his/her required share (already agreed
upon) from his/her individual checking account.

All “personal” expenses will be paid from each party’s individual Checking
account

Question 1: How to handle the transfer required from my individual checking
account to cover my part of the shared expenses and at the same time be able
to track how much I contributed to each of the shared costs? In MS Money, a
simple transfer will get the monies from my Individual Checking account to
the Joint checking account, and I know that the total “shared” expense can be
tracked from the Joint Checking account, but, again, how can I track how
much I contributed to each of the shared costs? As far as I can tell, this
info will not be captured in the transfer…

Question 2: How to categorize my wife’s transfers/deposits into the Joint
Checking in order to cover her part of the shared expenses? Remember, I won’t
be tracking her Individual checking account in Money so I can’t do a transfer
of any sort….

By the way, Dick, your suggestion about how what categories to use to bring
down the value of the house and the mortgage down to $0 made me LOL. By
setting up the categories and the classification as you suggested, I could
allow for multiple spouses and multiple divorces….Cynical, yes, but in its
own way it’s also cool….

Thanks,




"Dick Watson" wrote:

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Comments inline.

"dutchy999" <dutchy999[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:238E6EE6-8664-49C9-A997-28E7CA595488[at]microsoft.com...
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The general rule of thumb that seems to work is "follow the money". I this
case, you have an account with a balance today. At some point int he future,
you get some of that balance. The portion you get you can Transfer to
whereever you put the money. The portion you don't get needs some kind of
Expense--even if uncategorized--to make it go away.

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Here again, the advice to "follow the money" is appropriate. Sounds like
it's got to be similar to a real estate "sale" to me. (There's a umpmfaq
item on that case.) Here you can't be out of the loop because it seems there
has to be a closing or similar involved to protect your interests and get
you off the liability. So, the "asset" account value is going to be
transferred or expensed into several buckets for your purposes. And since
you are implicitly agreeing to an asset value (what's the share she's buying
out based on?) now's a good time to set the asset value to equal what you
agree on using an income transaction.

The first bucket is the loan payoff. Say you agree the asset value is $200k
and the loan balances are at $40k and $120k. Transfer the $40k/$120k to the
Money loan account balances and now they're both at liability of $0. Close
them. Done. They're off the books of your Money file no matter what happens
to them in the real world. (NB: were it I, I would NOT eliminate the Money
liability if I were not eliminating the personal legal liability to the
banks. If this is an agreement between the ex's without the banks involved,
you are still liable regardless if she walks on the banks.)

The second bucket is the equity you are getting out of the deal. Say you are
getting $14k. There goes the next $14k transfer out of the asset account to
wherever you want to deposit that money.

So, that'd leave the asset at $16k. Let's assume for the moment it got to be
this because there were $2k in costs, etc. You can either write of the whole
$16k as some kind of expense--with or without category; maybe call it
"Miscellaneous : Life's Painful Little Lessons" or something.
(Classification: "Divorce : [name of ex]"?) Or you can expense the $2k costs
and write off the $14k as the same divorce expense or you can expense half
of the $2k as what it is and all of the $15k as the divorce expense. I think
what you'd want to do might be dependent on things like how you want to
account for/split amongst you the deduction for the mortgage interest and
property taxes adjustment amounts. (This is an area about which I know
nada.)

All of that depends, of course, on how you are really doing this and whether
there is a formal real estate transaction involved or you are doing it ad
hoc. If you are just agreeing to an amount and she's writing you a check,
the same basic approach applies. I.e., from your PoV in Money, the asset
value is getting dissipated in the loan payoff and in the check to you and
in value she's taking with her. Asset value ends up $0 since you made it go
somewhere. Loan value ends up $0 since that's the first place you made the
asset value go. You end up with some cash from the asset and she ends up
with whatever is left--by definition since you are ending up with no asset;
Money Asset Account balance = $0; close it!--regardless of what it's worth.

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I appreciate the offer. My thought is that there are way too many variables
for general answers to be terribly helpful and it doesn't come up often
enough to qualify as a FAQ. Google willing, we will have this thread in the
archives until Yellowstone explodes or the asteroid strikes and we've
spelled divorce correctly so people will be able to find it.

Yes, 401K and stock options are in own separate accounts within the Money
file. I'm not sure deleting is the right things to do, since, as part of the
divorce agreement, the wife has to excercise some stock options and chash out
some of her 401K and turn the proceeds over to me... Tracking all of this in
my current Money file all depends on whether I can get the transaction
details from her... Not sure how to handle the proceeds in Money.

Some other questions that I've come up with are regarding our house: The
wife has agreed to "buy me out" and turn a certain part of the equity over to
me.

Any suggestions as to how to handle the proceeds of this transaction in Money?

What category to use for the adjustment required to bring the liability of
the mortgages (1st and 2nd) down to $0

What category to use for the adjustment required the bring the value of the
associated asset (house) down to $0

As a side note to Dick, as rotten as the situation is from a personal
perspective, I'd be happy to work with you if you want to develop a new part
called "divorce" for your FAQ. The information in your FAQ has been a gold
mine for me as to how to really get the most out of MS Money. If the
information I have re divorce is useful for your FAQ, I'd be happy to help
out.

As always, any feedback appreciated.

dutchy999

"Jeff M" wrote:

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Thankfully this is a financial situation I haven't had to deal with.

I would probably go to the Account Summary|Update tool and set the number of
shares/cash value of these accounts to 0. It will add Remove Shares/Account
Adjustment transactions. To those, I'd add memos in case I thought I needed
reminded why they were there.

Again, that answer is premised by my not having actually gone fown this
path.

"dutchy999" <dutchy999[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:E39E9A3A-3D75-4213-ADCE-B23F37F84742[at]microsoft.com...
- quote -

On Oct 25, 2:44 pm, dutchy999 <dutchy...[at]discussions.microsoft.comwrote:
- quote -

I assume that you would likely have her 401(k) and stock options in
their own separate accounts within your Money file. My inclination
would be to just delete those accounts as if they were never there.
They have no tax implications for you since they weren't in your name
and you neither gained nor lost anything in them since they were/are
her accounts. Other less-easily separable accounts will be trickier
to handle, but the two examples you gave should be straightforward.

Jeff

After 15 yrs of marriage I'm getting divorced. My spouse is no longer willing
to share her transaction data with me. I could start a new file, but I would
prefer to keep my current file, which has 5 years of data in it. Since my
spouse is not willing to give me the data to properly handle the divorce in
MS Money, I have the following question

What category should I use for the adjustments required to bring my spouse's
401K and stock options accounts to $0?

I checked the FAQ, but there's no section on divorce and how to handle
things in Money. Dick, any suggestions?

As I go through this process, I'm sure more questions will come up.

Any assistance appreciated