Income from Retirement Investments?

Dennis Craven dcraven at gmail.com
Fri Nov 17 15:15:13 EST 2006


On 11/13/06, Dale Alspach <alspach at math.okstate.edu> wrote:
> Since I cannot touch either type of change of value and it is taxable
> income sometime in the distant future, I don't want it showing up in my
> currrent income.

Agreed. There appears to be two camps here. One who prefer to have the
increase in value appear as current income (and therefore credit an
Income account), and those who do not (and therefore credit an asset
account). It seems to be more of a personal preference than a GAAP, as
nobody came into the thread with a definitive "No, that's incorrect."
type of response.

So to make the increased value appear as income now, one would make
the following entry reflecting an increase of $100:

Assets:Investments:MyFund                   100.00
Income:Investments:Unrealized Gain                      100.00

And to make it *not* appear as income, but still track the continually
changing value of the fund:

Assets:Investments:MyFund                   100.00
Assets:Investments:Unrealized Gain                      100.00

I'm just summarizing here for the sake of completion so that anyone
searching the archives for a similar answer can find it. Thanks for
the input, folks :)

Cheers,
~djc


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