Budgeting with Tax-Free categories

Jeff K

Quicken Deluxe 2020 - latest update today

I am trying to create a budget that includes investment income. I have two IRA categorized accounts, and they appear under 'Retirement'. The 'Reinvest Dividend' entries show up in the budget under 'Dividends', not 'Dividends Tax-Free'. I don't see a way to change the entries to 'tax-free', so I expected Quicken to automatically categorize these as such.

How do I get these transactions to show up as tax-free income instead of taxable in a budget? Is this a bug?

Thanks,
Jeff

John_in_NC

My apologies for the delay.

(Edit: I did just check in a test file, and I do see my dividends showing up in the budget-I don't know what has changed, so my apologies if I misspoke.) 

As far as Dividend versus Dividend Tax-Free-that category difference comes from whether or not you have the Security setup as being tax free. (You would mark that option for things like municipal bonds. You would not use this setting to differentiate between securities held in investment accounts that do/do not have tax implications to you.) I question if you have that flag set correctly for the security.

While the tax report will break out which investments are taxable, the budget will not. It will simply display everything you have setup to track.

John_in_NC

Hi, Jeff:

I am not sure how you are doing this as neither Investment accounts nor transfers are supported in the budget module at this time. So, I don't know how it is capturing this income. Perhaps you aren't tracking those investment accounts within Quicken. 

That said, even if your budget can capture them, there is no way to mark if a category is/isn't tax free for budgets. Quite honestly, I have never heard of a user being concerned about this, so I question what your end goal is. 

Jeff K

Thanks for the reply. I used Quicken windows for decades, and have recently returned to using Quicken Mac after trying a few on-line tools for a few years. I was less than thrilled. So I'm brushing up on my Quicken skills.

I did not know that investment accounts are not supported in the budget module. I assumed they were since the dividend transactions are included in the budget actuals.

My goal is to see taxable income in the budget report. The category selection shows 'Dividend Tax-Free', so I assumed (maybe incorrectly) that the budget module would recognize the IRA dividends as tax-free, and not include them in regular dividends.

Currently, the dividends from my taxable and non-taxable accounts are co-mingled in the budget report. And I need to get them separated. I think I need to create customized categories and wait for native support.

Thanks again,
Jeff

John_in_NC

My apologies for the delay.

(Edit: I did just check in a test file, and I do see my dividends showing up in the budget-I don't know what has changed, so my apologies if I misspoke.) 

As far as Dividend versus Dividend Tax-Free-that category difference comes from whether or not you have the Security setup as being tax free. (You would mark that option for things like municipal bonds. You would not use this setting to differentiate between securities held in investment accounts that do/do not have tax implications to you.) I question if you have that flag set correctly for the security.

While the tax report will break out which investments are taxable, the budget will not. It will simply display everything you have setup to track.

Jeff K

I did not have the tax-free flag set on the securities. Now I do and the budget report tracks things correctly.

This solves my issues. Thank you!