Your house going up in value is not a paycheck
Your home is worth $20,000 more than last year. Real, and worth knowing. But you can't spend it, you didn't earn it as income, and a month where its value rose is not a month where you made more money. Only one number should move for it, and it isn't your paycheck.
A paper gain and a paycheck are different things
When an asset you own is worth more than it was, that is an unrealized gain. Unrealized because you haven't sold it. The value is real on paper, but no money has arrived, and none will until you sell.
A paycheck is the opposite in every way that matters here: money actually shows up, it is spendable, and it is income you earned. Your house gaining $20,000 shares none of those. Filing the two together tells you that you earned $20,000 you cannot touch.
What should move, and what shouldn't
One number should change when your house is revalued: your net worth. You own something worth more, so you are worth more, and the balance sheet should say so.
Three numbers should not move. Your income doesn't, because you earned nothing. Your savings rate doesn't, because you saved nothing out of what you earned. And your spendable cash doesn't, because a paper gain is not money in the bank. An app that routes the gain through income moves all three, and every one of them lies.
How it's recorded properly
Updating a value is a one-sided fact about what something is worth, so the other side lands in a value adjustment rather than in your income. Your net worth moves by the change; your income statement never sees it. The gain sits on the balance sheet, where a gain in value belongs, and out of the story of what you earned and spent this month.
In Marked Money you enter the new value yourself, because a house or a private holding has no feed that knows what it's worth, and the figure is marked as your estimate rather than a fact. The change updates your net worth and stays out of your spending.
When a gain becomes real
The day you sell is the day the gain stops being on paper. The money arrives, and now there is something to account for: the difference between what you paid and what you sold for.
That is a separate event from the years of the value drifting up, and it is also where tax questions live. How a sale is treated on a return depends on the asset and your situation, and it is a question for someone who can see your whole picture, not a budgeting app.
Marked Money splits a loan payment for you and keeps the three parts straight afterwards, so paying down a debt stops looking like spending it.
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