Hello everyone, I'm trying to switch from gnucash to beancount and having some trouble with the concept of tracking investments at cost. I feel that I've RTFM'd enough to understand the mechanics of cost vs price, but I'm not sure about the benefits of using cost in the first place.
Simply put: I have no plans to use beancount to calculate my taxes, why should I track cost at all? What are the disadvantages of just using price and not cost for everything (including investments)? As I understand it, this would be equivalent to how gnucash does it, which seems to work just fine for me so far. What am I missing? In addition to extra bookkeeping complexity, tracking investments at cost turns capital gains into income, which (while correct from the taxation point of view) feels wrong to me. When I sell old investments at a gain and immediately buy something else with the resulting money, it doesn't create any meaningful income for me (especially if it's in a tax-advantaged account), my net worth is still exactly the same as yesterday - why do I want it to show up as income in my reports? Thanks, Max -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Beancount" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to beancount+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/bf68f106-2913-41b1-8176-20ee0613755en%40googlegroups.com.
