Some questions about tracking personal finances

replicon replicon at gmail.com
Wed Jan 4 11:17:14 EST 2017


Hi all,

So, I've had such a good time setting up my biz stuff with gnucash that I've
decided to use it starting this year to track all my money and where it
goes.

It's pretty easy to set it up for my personal tracking, but I want to do it
'correctly', such that in addition to that, if I choose to do my taxes with
an accountant next year, rather than TurboTax, I can generate a bunch of
reports, hand them over, and expect them to be correct.


So, while going through my various stuff, I've come up with some relevant
questions that I hope someone can answer. If this is not good form for this
list, I'm happy to break these up into separate posts...



1) "Tax-Related" Accounts: It looks like you can set tax options (through
some workflow other than that checkbox), but the manual doesn't really give
that section a proper introduction. Is this something I should worry about,
or something I can configure later without having to go back in and move
everything around?

2) If I look at my paystub, it's got a breakdown of where things are going.
Some of them are pre-tax (e.g. 401k, benefits (dental/vision/medical)), and
some are just taxes. Taxes are easy, just transfer to expense:Tax
subaccounts, but is there any best practice for the pre-tax stuff? Is that
just generic expenses?

3) Itemization - so far, I've always gone with the default deduction, but
for all I know, this might change. What are some best practices to help make
that decision? I assume a "sales tax" account under Expense:Tax is one, but
are there any others? I know very little about this stuff.

4) RSUs: I get restricted stock units on a vesting schedule, and part of
them are always sold to account for income tax. How do you guys model this?
Two transactions, one to receive the RSU (transfer: Income), and one to
auto-sell the tax portion (transfer: Expense:Tax:Income:RSU or something)?

5) 401k: Any special considerations? I was thinking of doing something like
this:
https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2003-January/005402.html -
fairly simple, though the transactions are just adjustments to the total,
for calculating net worth. This kind of goes back to the "pre-tax" question
as well.

6) Home: I paid off the condo I live in a while ago. I assume this is now
just an asset with... whatever zillow tells me the place is worth? Or should
it be "what I bought it for" (price + closing costs)?

7) Charitable Donations 1: When I give to charities, and get a tax receipt,
how should I model that? I get the sense that such "tax writeoff" type
things just need to be "negative income", since that's my understanding of
how it's done at tax time.

8) Charitable Donations 2: Does the above apply for the case where I give
existing items (e.g. clothes), and I get a blank receipt on which to write
what I think those clothes were worth?

9) Finding extra unaccounted-for cash: Let's say I find a $100 bill in my
couch in a few months. Does that "Cash" transaction just balance against a
new "opening balance"? I can't imagine it's "income", since it's already
mine, so it's like... "an opening balance I wasn't aware of until now" :-)

10) Selling personal items: Same kind of question as above. If I hold a
garage sale, and sell a bunch of things I own at a steep discount, is that
considered "income"? I'd be more inclined to think of it similarly to
"finding a $100 bill in my couch", since I'm just selling stuff I bought a
long time ago at some un-calculable loss.



Thanks for taking the time! I really appreciate this, this list has been so
valuable to me!

Happy New Year!




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