Hi list, I file taxes in both the US and Canada, for which I have to calculate capital gains differently:
a) In Canada I'm deemed to have bought most of my assets on the date I moved here. There's no such fiction on my US taxes. b) When calculating capital gains, Canada taxes use average cost booking; for the US I can somewhat choose the booking method. Has anyone dealt with this using beancount? My tentative plan is below, but suggestions would be welcome. Plan: * In beancount, I'll enter all data from the US point of view: individual lots get bought and sold, and it should be straightforward to use beancount to compute my capital gains for US taxes. * In Canada, I will take advantage of the fact that average cost booking is more-or-less deterministic: there are (almost) no choices for me to make, so it should be possible to construct the average cost basis just from the beancount leger after discarding all the lot information. So: I'll cobble together some custom code, probably involving bean-query, to compute the average cost for each of my sales. I'm not afraid to write a bit of code, but I'm not sure how much effort this will be. * (It's tempting to just use average-cost booking for the US so things agree in both countries, but one problem with that is point (a) above.) Alternative ideas: * Maintain separate Beancount ledgers for both countries. * Write some weird plugin to facilitate average cost basis tracking even while I'm using beancount's standard lot tracking to do things from the USA point of view. * Do the Canada stuff by hand. It's probably not that bad. * Pay someone to do my taxes for me. Last year that cost me a few thousand dollars, and this year I'd rather spend a few days tinkering than pay that. Currently I've been ignoring Beancount's lot-tracking features partly because of this issue, but the time has come for me to import a bunch of my trades so I think it's time for me to figure out how I'm going to do this. -- James -- 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 on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/20210304210142.xiq427y5uzhasz64%40moth.falsifian.org.
