Tracking a 401K investment

[Mike or Penny Novack]

On 12/14/2015 7:54 PM, david.carlson.417 at gmail.com wrote:
>      You do not actually get income from a 401k until they send you a distribution.   Then you need to pay tax and maybe a penalty if you are not rolling it over to an IRA or you are getting old enough to get senior discounts at some restaurants.
> If they invest the funds in stocks or mutual funds, one choice some of us use is to set up an asset type brokerage account in GnuCash using the example in the tutorial.
> David C
> Sent from my LG G Pad 7.0 LTE, an AT&T 4G LTE tablet

This, like other cases of conditional income and conditional assets 
(life insurance, for example, or in the case of a 401K, changes in 
vesting) might best be tracked outside your main books. You probably do 
want to be able to see what your net worth is including these things and 
can be important when applying for a mortgage, etc. And employer 
provided insurance, especially things like "split dollar" can be 
important when considering alternative job offers.

Gnucash can keep more than one set of books for you, and this is a case 
where you could make good use of a subsidiary set of books. The data 
from reports produced can be combined in a spread sheet to show your 
"real" income, net worth, etc.

Michael