On Sat, Oct 29, 2022 at 1:46 PM Peter <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm looking for some beancount (and maybe general accounting?) advice here:
>
> Investing successfully in stocks makes you a subject for capital gains
> taxes. But investing in stocks comes with a cost for buying and selling
> shares. That cost is deductible from your capital gains and, therefore,
> lowers your taxes.
>
> I'd like to keep track of my capital gains tax liabilities over the course
> of the year. This prevents me from spending/investing money I don't
> have/actually own. I'm wondering how I could do that, while being accurate
> and factoring in the deductible costs.
>
> My first approach to book/track my stock investments was really simple:
>
> option "booking_method" "FIFO"
> option "operating_currency" "EUR"
> plugin "beancount.plugins.auto_accounts"
>
> 2017-06-26 * "" "Open broker account"
> Assets:Broker:Cash 385 USD
> Equity:Opening-Account
>
> 2017-06-26 * "" "Buy AAPL"
> Assets:Broker:Stocks:AAPL 10 AAPL { 38.37 USD }
> Assets:Broker:Cash -385 USD
> Expenses:Broker:Fees 1.3 USD
>
> 2018-06-26 * "" "Sell AAPL"
> Assets:Broker:Stocks:AAPL -10 AAPL { } @ 48.55 USD
> Assets:Broker:Cash 484 USD
> Expenses:Broker:Fees 1.5 USD
> Income:CapitalGain -101.80 USD
>
> I didn't care about tracking outstanding taxes and I just booked the fees
> as cost.
>
> My next iteration factors in my tax liabilities (assuming a fantasy 10%
> capital gains tax):
>
> option "booking_method" "FIFO"
> option "operating_currency" "EUR"
> plugin "beancount.plugins.auto_accounts"
>
> 2017-06-26 * "" "Open broker account"
> Assets:Broker:Cash 385 USD
> Equity:Opening-Account
>
> 2017-06-26 * "" "Buy AAPL"
> Assets:Broker:Stocks:AAPL 10 AAPL { 38.37 USD }
> Assets:Broker:Cash -385 USD
> Expenses:Broker:Fees 1.3 USD
>
> 2018-06-26 * "" "Sell AAPL"
> Assets:Broker:Stocks:AAPL -10 AAPL { } @ 48.55 USD
> Assets:Broker:Cash 484 USD
> Expenses:Broker:Fees 1.5 USD
> Income:CapitalGain -91.62 USD
> Liabilities:Tax:TY2018:CapitalGain -10.18 USD
> ; Net worth is 473.82 USD, because there are 10.18 USD taxes outstanding
>
> This approach is okay and gives me a rough estimation of my tax
> liabilities. My problem is: It doesn't factor in the deductible fees.
> (Well, it does factor in the fess paid in the selling transaction,
> actually, but it disregards the costs from the buying txn(s).)
>
> While this is a minor problem for this particular example it can become
> quite relevant for bigger numbers/more buying txn coming with more fees.
>
> So, how do I account for costs resulting from purchases correctly?
>
I looked at doing this within the constraints of the syntax and it's hard
(surprisingly so).
I developed https://github.com/beancount/johnny to do much more complex
things with investing, including cross-referencing against my broker's CSV
files for matches, and more. Unfortunately Johnny is not integrated with
Beancount and also not really a thing I spent much time making easy to use
for others.
I guess, a possibility would be to allocate the buying fees proportionally
> to the buy share price. This approach would increase the 2017-06-26 share
> price from 38.37 to 38.37+1.3/10=38.5 USD.
> The major disadvantage would be that I wouldn't really know how much fees
> I actually paid. Hence, that is an option I rather dislike.
>
> Are there other/better options/approaches dealing with that?
>
> Kind regards
>
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