what is proper category for medical insurance?

jimturn

what is proper category for medical insurance?

jacobs

Quicken creates a default category: Health & Fitness: Health Insurance. 

That category is not tied to any tax schedule in Quicken, so you can use it or create your own.

If your tax circumstances are such that your health insurance costs are deductible -- they aren't being deducted from your pay, and your healthcare costs will exceed 10% of your adjusted gross income (AGI), then you could create a category and tie it to a Schedule A tax field. Or you could just use the total in your health insurance category for your taxes at the end of the year, without configuring it in Quicken.

Barbara O'Keeffe

This is extremely short sighted on Quicken's part. Yes, for most people, Health Insurance isn't tax deductible anymore, same as charity donations. BUT, this year up to $300 of charity donations (non-profit) are eligible for a $300 credit. So you need that info as you do your taxes. Very, very poor planning. Always put it in, if you don't need it, you don't bother with it, if you do, better not to have to go looking for it! That's why I use very few of the Quicken's default field but make my own.

volvogirl

By the way, the threshold for Medical is still 7.5% of AGI for everybody.  

jacobs

Barbara O'Keeffe said:

This is extremely short sighted on Quicken's part. Yes, for most people, Health Insurance isn't tax deductible anymore, same as charity donations. BUT, this year up to $300 of charity donations (non-profit) are eligible for a $300 credit. So you need that info as you do your taxes. Very, very poor planning. 

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying is short-sighted and poor planning. For most Americans, health insurance isn't tax deductible. The rules around what is or isn't deductible are rather complex, particularly if you're self employed, and go well beyond what Quicken handles automatically regarding taxes. But it takes only a few seconds to set up a category for health insurance expenses and link it to Schedule A for anyone who has even an inkling they may have medical expenses large enough to be deductible:



It would then be up to the Quicken user to control which expenses to put into that tax-related category versus another category not tax-related.

So Quicken can certainly help users track health insurance expenses for possible deduction, on their taxes, if a user doesn't have employer-provided healthcare and wants to track it. So I'm not understanding where you're seeing a problem.

As for charitable deductions, that's a different kettle of fish. Here, Quicken has a default category for charitable deductions already linked to Schedule A, so as long as users select the Gifts & Donations: Charity category, for their donations, it will be reported out on the Tax Schedule report. It's up to the tax software or preparer to pull out the $300 special deduction this year, and determine if the user has enough deductions to itemize. (Fewer than 10% of tax filers itemized deductions last year -- and most of them probably aren't using Quicken to manage their finances. )