Retirement acct withdrawal accounting

Eric Beversluis ebever at researchintegration.org
Sat Apr 15 08:39:24 EDT 2017


As I'm working on my taxes I realize that GnuCash as I've set it up 
doesn't give me a readout on taxable distributions from my retirement 
accounts.

I enter them as transfers from the relevant retirement acct to my 
checking, with expense entries for withheld taxes. So it would take a 
lot of digging and copying to a spreadsheet to get the totals from 
GnuCash. Of course I get 1099-R's that give me the total, but it seems 
to me that the accounting system should show this too.

I can't show it as a form of income, even though at the end of the year 
it is part of my taxable income. It really is a transfer. My net worth 
does not go up when I make a withdrawal from the retirement account.

Any ideas how this should be handled in proper accounting? Do I maybe 
set up another account ("Taxable retirement transfers"), enter the 
transfers there and then transfer again to checking and tax expenses? 
That seems rather Rube Goldbergian.

Thanks.

-- 
Eric Beversluis
www.ericbeversluis.com <http://www.ericbeversluis.com>


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