I have been struggling with how to manage retirement accounts in beancount. I think my problem may be primarily a conceptual one.
IMHO, you’re spot on: truly understanding what’s going on at a conceptual level will then make the syntax and the rest of it very simple. So let me respond at that level. Where I get particularly confused is in how to handle trades within retirement accounts for stocks/funds that have gained value. In these cases we havent realized income but there are trades that depend on the value gained for certain stocks/funds. Just to clarify: income is actually realized, even within a retirement account when a stock is sold. Whether or not that income is taxed is immaterial do the bookkeeping itself. I've included a minimal ledger below where I have tried to create an example of where I get confused. In the case of a retirement account when the rebalance transaction is performed there are gains relative to the average cost of STOCK1. Right now this ledger will throw an error because the rebalance transaction lot selection is ambiguous. The ambiguity could be resolved with FIFO or LIFO bookkeeping but this is beside the point. Say we set it to use FIFO bookkeeping. In this case the trade transaction as it is currently written does not balance. In beancount where should we say that $5 has come from? It isn't really income but it is necessary to balance the transaction. I thought about using Equity but then this becomes difficult to track the gains of the retirement account as a whole. Issue #1: Realizing and booking income: See above. I book these to (for example) Income:Investments:Roth:Capital-Gains:Account1 Issue #2: Cost basis matters, because they will determine the cash balance in your account after any sale of stock. So how do you get that right? If your broker uses average cost booking within retirement accounts, note that Beancount does not currently support that method, automatically at least. A way for you to simulate it is to book this by 1) selling all your stock, 2) buying all them back at the average cost, and then 3) booking your actual sale. Hope that helps. -- 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 [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/5c02af31-2c04-4472-86b2-cbeaab372d59n%40googlegroups.com.
