Tracking a 401K investment

[David T.]

jmk,

You’re talking about actual dividends; the original post was referring to changes in valuation. That is the conditional income for which Michael was suggesting separate books.

As Tommy mentions elsewhere, recording your dividend income into a separate income account should suffice for maintaining these transactions. You don’t need separate books for that. When it comes to reporting, omit the account in question.

As for the question of queston of tracking ongoing value of a portfolio, my method is to periodically update the prices for my holdings and then run the investment portfolio report. That gives me a general idea how things are going. 

David

> On Dec 15, 2015, at 11:36 AM, jmk <jmk at cmail.nu> wrote:
> 
> I have been tracking my 401k in GnuCash along with everything else and
> recording income from dividends as "Income:Dividends".
> 
> If I'm reading you correctly you are suggesting tracking this in a
> separate set of books because it will show up as income on my income
> statement for the end of the year, however you aren't actually taxed on
> this income until you retire and make withdrawals.  I wonder if there is
> a way to do this (recording the dividend income as something else?) and
> still keep only one set of books.
> 
> On 12/15/2015 07:51 AM, Mike or Penny Novack wrote:
>> 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
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