Thank you both - really appreciate your responsiveness and willingness to help me understand this better. I'm going to work on this some more, and I might come back with some additional clarifications as I work through it. Thank you again!
On Saturday, June 21, 2025 at 4:01:41 PM UTC-7 Red S wrote: > 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/b9eab350-5dc1-468b-bf7c-1289718bb462n%40googlegroups.com.
