How to record stock that goes to zero

[Tommy Trussell]

On Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 10:17 AM, David Carlson
<david.carlson.417 at gmail.com>wrote:

> On 12/27/2013 4:59 PM, Scott H wrote:
> > I recently had some stock go to zero (yuck). I couldn't find anything in
> > the documentation about how to record this. I tried to record a "sale"
> > of all my shares with a share price of $0.00 USD but it won't let me do
> > that since GnuCash requires a non-zero share value. How should I record
> > this?
> >
> > I'm also not sure how to record the loss itself anyway. For example, do
> > I create an account called "Expenses:Realized Losses" and record it
> > there, or do I record it as negative income in "Income:Realized Gains"?
> > In other words, are all capital gains and losses typically stored in one
> > place? The documentation didn't seem clear about this either. Thanks in
> > advance.
>
> I think that the US IRS is much more likely to accept a write-off if the
> stock is actually sold.  My broker bought back the stock that he had
> originally sold me that later tanked for a few cents a share.  That
> makes a clean report from the brokerage house to support your tax return.
>
> David C
>

If your stock is worth nothing, you will have trouble selling it -- UNLESS
you have a paper certificate... you can sell the paper to a documents
collector.

I had several securities that were gifts to me when I was a child that
became worthless in the past few years. My broker couldn't sell them so she
wrote me a letter saying they were worthless so I could document a complete
loss for tax purposes.

I don't know the answer about whether a loss is considered a negative gain
or a separate category, but you can document it however you need to in
GnuCash and your tax advisor will know how to handle it.



> -----
> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
>