I'm confused by this. My loan was paid off in April 2020. If I use the principal balance at payoff time, the beginning balance and he payoff balance will be used to come up with the average balance. I also have another loan for the whole year (for another property), and the two averages are added up when calculating the overall average mortgage. But this doesn't sound right - For the loan that's paid off, I only had its balance for 4 months, not the whole year like the other one. TurboTax asks for the payoff date, but entering whatever date doesn't seem to change the calculation - it simply adding the beginning and payoff principal and divided by 2.
If I manually add up each month's mortgage balance and divide by 12, i'll get a very different (more accurate) number. As I mistaking something? Some posts suggested putting 0 as the final principal balance, but that doesn't sound right either.
