US Federal bond interest

[Dave Reed]

On Monday 23 August 2004 13:16, Thomas John Vitolo wrote:
> When using gnucash, I'd like to include my US bonds (series E and EE) 
in my
> assets.  Of course, I can have
> 
> Investments
> |-Bonds
>   |-Bond_1
>   |-Bond_2
> 
> etc.  However, I'm not sure how to account for the accrued value of 
the bond. 
> For starters, differet series of bonds have different rules about (1) 
when they
> can be cashed, and (2) penalties for early cashing.
> 
> I would like to put in bonds so that, for example, Bond_1 is a Series 
E (issued
> mm1/yy1), and Bond_2 is a Series EE (issued mm2/yy2), and that they 
each update
> their values based on a query to their interest rates, the date 
issued, and the
> current date.  Of course, the added value of the bond should be in the 
form of
> Income:Interest (I would think!).
> 
> My current sludged solution is to enter the purchase price of the 
bond, and then
> us a website to calculate it's current value.  Then, I insert 
Income:Interest
> for the difference of the current value and purchase price, so that 
the total
> value of the account is the total value of the bond, and the purchase 
price and
> interest are listed seperately.  Of course, this is a sludge solution, 
and might
> not even be kosher by accounting standards (IANAA).
> 
> 
> Can my "idea" be done at all?  How?  If not, how close is this to a 
feature?  I
> might be interested in helping develop this feature, but I admittedly 
know
> little about bonds or Finance::Quote.
> 

Unless you have a lot of bonds, I would stick with doing it by
hand. I'm not aware of an automated solution. There are a couple
issues regarding federal bonds. At least for some (and maybe all) you
have can defer the interest income for tax purposes until you cash
them. You may be able to count the interest each year if you want, but
I'm not certain. So if you use gnucash to help you with your taxes,
you won't want to enter the interest income if you are deferring
it. My solution is basically what you do - add the interest income by
hand when I need to. I do the calculations separately for calculating
the cash-in values of the bonds, but never store that info in
gnucash. I guess it would be nice if gnucash could do that, but it's
not that big a deal to me.

Dave