Donations from My Retirement Account

John 411

Is there a simple way to handle a donation to charity made from my retirement account? Is legal but has anyone been able to show it in Quicken w/o a work around?

Tom Young

To make this work - if you can - there has to be a workaround because you're trying to do statutory accounting, e.g., IRS rules, in a program that is designed for conventional GAAP-like accounting.  The easiest way, by far, is to transfer the requisite cash amount to your checking account, eliminate the "cash" in by expensing it as a charitable contribution, and ignore the fact that Quicken treats the distribution as income for tax purposes.

Tom Young

To make this work - if you can - there has to be a workaround because you're trying to do statutory accounting, e.g., IRS rules, in a program that is designed for conventional GAAP-like accounting.  The easiest way, by far, is to transfer the requisite cash amount to your checking account, eliminate the "cash" in by expensing it as a charitable contribution, and ignore the fact that Quicken treats the distribution as income for tax purposes.

John 411

Thanks for the reply. I have done something similar to what you have suggested. Honestly, I am trying to budget and track cash flow more than taxes. It just bugs me that investment income/expense is for the most part a pain the handle without work arounds.

Tom Young

Some statutory accounting is fairly easy to do, at the cost of straining the definition of "income".  So in a traditional IRA for example, real income inside the account can be ignored by simply leaving that Account out of a Quicken report of income and expenses, and transfers out of that account into your checking account can be called "income" by including the transfer out of the Account in a Quicken report of income and expenses. 

The Qualified Charitable Distribution is more difficult to shoehorn into Quicken.  Not only do you not recognize the income inside the retirement account, you also don't recognize the distribution as income but you do get to record the charitable deduction!  I've never done one of these and I guess I could come up with a workaround if I really tried, maybe, (I did think about this, but the process seemed pretty convoluted and I didn't actually make any Quicken entries), so "easy" won out.