> > Fair enough. I wanted to know if I'm missing something about the purpose > of tracking cost in beancount and I guess the answer that it's mainly for > tax reasons.
Sounds like you realize this already, but: tax planning and strategy are an important and integral part of asset management for those with any significant assets. This becomes tricky once one (is forced to) has multiple brokers <https://reds-rants.netlify.app/personal-finance/how-many-accounts-might-a-person-have/> for various reasons. You might find yourself wanting beancount to do tax analysis later down the line. It's not that I'm philosophically opposed to it, more like I have 5+ years > of transactions without the cost basis and I'm not sure how to start using > it now without having to backfill everything at once. Is there a good way > to record the lots I currently own (according to the brokerage) without > filling in all the history that led to their creation? > In addition to what the other posters on this thread suggested, when I first ran into this long ago, one of my accounts happened to have used FIFO, which beancount already has, which meant zero work for me other than setting it. For account with SpecID, I wrote a simple parser to which I fed screenscrapes of sale transactions (of which I didn't have many) with lot info. This was relatively easy. Although I'm still not clear on why I should consider it income when my > 401k provider decides to automatically swap out the ETF I own to a > different share class with a different ticker and price. > Income is not realized in this case by the IRS (because it's just changing share class, even if done outside a 401k). I agree philosophically too that income has not been realized (same underlying asset, not a sale/buy, but a change in class, like a stock split), but to each his own. -- 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/71d58d6d-2001-4151-bc27-8eb697551dddn%40googlegroups.com.
