*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*
Really? A realized gain is not income? I have used Gnucash in the past, and it always wanted a purchase price for shares. And then it had some realized and unrealized gain reports. If you just need a text file with the current value of your investments. Make a Google sheet, publish it, and then use wget to download the results. On Thu, 22 Apr 2021 at 03:43, Max Katsev <mkat...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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 > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/bf68f106-2913-41b1-8176-20ee0613755en%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> > . > -- Boyd Kelly <bke...@coastsystems.net> www: http://www.coastsystems.net Tel: +1 604 837-0765 -- 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/CAN10%3D3oudGV8fNxJr9seP8uUAQVZRcta--UfF-tDcyMsR2GVMQ%40mail.gmail.com.
