On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 1:19 PM, James A. Robinson <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > Right, this is also what I understand. What I'm suggesting above is a
> method
> > to keep track of the "after-tax basis" that lives in your account, that
> is,
> > the sum total of all non-deductible contributions you made in the past
> (what
> > you called the "cost basis"). You would add legs with another
> "commodity",
> > say "AFTERTAX" or "ROTH" or whatever you prefer to call it, something
> like
> > this:
> >
> > 2014-01-01 * MyCo Paycheck
> > ...
> > Income:Prepaid Tax:Income:Federal -400.00 AFTERTAX
> > Assets:401k:MyCo 400.00 AFTERTAX
> >
> > The sum of all "AFTERTAX" units will tell you how much money you can get
> a
> > non-taxable distribution of.
> > If you do take a distribution, you have to remember to also add matching
> and
> > appropriate legs to it:
> >
> > 2014-01-01 * MyCo Paycheck
> > Assets:401k:MyCo $-2100.00
> > Assets:Bank:Checking $2100.00
> > Assets:401k:MyCo -2100.00 AFTERTAX
> > Expenses:Distributions 2100.00 AFTERTAX
> >
> > This works:
> >
> > Assets:401k:MyCo's AFTERTAX units count how much of that account is
> > after-tax basis
> >
> > Income:Prepaid Tax:Income:Federal counts the total of your after-tax
> > contributions made during the exercise period
> >
> > Expenses:Distributions's AFTERTAX units tells you how much after-tax
> > distributions you receives during the exercise period
>
> Am I understanding correctly that you are saying to just
> flag a certain dollar amount into the Assets:401k:MyCo
> account as being after-tax, and to track that over the years?
>
I'm not sure what you mean by "flagging", but what I mean is using an
alternative commodity ("AFTERTAX") to count the after-tax amounts
contributed in parallel to the real dollar ("$" or "USD") ones (by "in
parallel", I mean that the same number of units appears twice, e.g. in the
2100$ postings and in the 2100 AFTERTAX postings). You could put those
AFTERTAX units either in the same account, or in another one, as you
prefer. In Beancount's asset reporting, these would appear in the assets
column, and you can just ignore those units if you like, or you can set a
price of AFTERTAX to 0$ so that their disappear.
This is a pretty common case, and I could consider writing a plug-in to
automate the insertion of such postings (if you use Beancount, you can
write your own plugin with hard-coded account names in the code, that will
work; when I write plugins I have to try to go a bit further and provide
generic behavior others can reuse, so I have to get creative in how I infer
or let users specify which account names to use for these automatically
inserted entries).
I'm not sure I following what the Expenses:Distributions
> account entry is for, why is it an expense?
It's an expense of AFTERTAX units because you've used them up by getting a
distribution. You'd similarly "use up" dollars ($) to get a meal at a
restaurant, it's the same logic. (More rationale: it has to be an income
account (income or expense) and not a balance sheet account (assets or
liabilities) because that's a *transient* amount, that is, the sum total of
all used up distributions is not important, unlike an asset account.
Because its amount is always positive, it should be an expense account and
not an income account.)
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