I’ve got Chase set up with Stessa to pull over my mortgage information. It’s great - it separates out principal, interest, and the escrow payments. However, whenever Chase then makes a payment out of the escrow account to cover taxes or insurance, Stessa is categorizing those as a refund to me. Is there a way to filter those payments out so it doesn’t count the escrow money as money I’m getting back, other than just remembering to manually delete them when they pull?
To be clear, these are not the actual refunds from if the escrow account was overfilled - they are the tax and insurance payments coming back to me as refunds.
When the insurance or tax bills are paid, you should be seeing two transactions pull into Stessa from your financial institution. A (-) transaction and a (+) transaction. If you’re not seeing these automatically from your bank, you may need to manually create one of these.
For example: expense the (-) to “Property Taxes” under “Taxes” and the (+) to “Property Tax Escrows” or “General Escrow Payments” under “Transfers” depending on where you’re expensing the recurring monthly escrow costs. Note that there are a few schools-of-thought on how people handle escrows. This follows the accrual accounting school-of-thought.
Stessa does it’s best to auto-categorize the transaction but it is not always right. You should check each and every transaction to make sure the category is correct.
I hope this helps.