tax deferred gains and interest

pamela77

Hello. Quicken automatically choses where to put long term cap gains, short term cap gains etc. I would like to have different categories for those items when earned in an IRA rather than a brokerage account. Is there a way to designate certain accounts as such?

pamela77

I tried to edit the transactions individually, but when I click on edit, it shows a box with the information from schwab, but it will not allow me to change the dividend to tax free dividend, or a cap gain to and unrealized gain.

jacobs

@pamela77  Are your retirement accounts designated as retirement accounts in Quicken? That is, if you're in one of those accounts and select Account Settings, are your IRA accounts showing that their Type=Traditional IRA (or other form of IRA). This allows Quicken to know that, for instance, capital gains in the retirement account do not appear in a Tax Schedule report. In your left sidebar, you should be seeing a subheading for Brokerage and another for Retirement if your accounts are defined correctly.

pamela77

Thank you, the IRA is definitely in the retirement account section, the HSA and the roth are not, so I will change them. The biggest account is the IRA though, it it appears to be in the right place.

pamela77

I also went into the individual account, and under "type" the drop down menu did not include _unrlzed gain, or _divinctaxfree, just dividend income or gain, and that is in the IRA

jacobs

Quicken's default account for investment income do not include any prefix character, which is what you mentioned (_unrlzed gain). Previous versions of Quicken Mac and Quicken Windows used different default categories, which can cause some confusion when migrating to current Quicken Mac. Did you switch to Quicken Mac in the past year?

So it's correct that in an investment account, the transaction Types are simple names: Buy, Sell, Reinvest Dividend, Dividend Income, etc.  These are all "wired" internally to to Quicken's investment categories, which are all sub-categories of Investments and have names like Dividend Income, Realized Gain/Loss, etc.  Both taxable and tax-free accounts use the same types of transactions; there is not a different type of transaction in a tax-free account like an IRA.

Whether an investment's gains are tax-free or not can be determined by two different factors: (1) if the security is in an account which has a Type setting of a tax-free/tax-deferred account like an IRA, Roth IRA or 401k, or (2) if the Security is marked as tax-free, such as a tax-exempt bond fund. (Note that Quicken does not delve into fine points of tax record-keeping, such as bond funds which are tax-free at the federal level bu taxable, or partly-taxable, at a state level; those details are dealt with by your tax preparer or in your tax software.)

pamela77

Yes, thank you, I did migrate from windows about a year ago, so I will delete those prefix categories.

And thank you I now understand that the same transaction type means two different things depending on if it is used in a taxable vx non taxed account.

So when I look at a category report it combines all the dividend income from both taxable and not taxed accounts together? Is there a way to see a report with the taxable and non taxable dividend income separate? Is there a way to categorize them to keep them separate.

My IRA account is correctly in the retirement section and is correctly labeled as a traditional IRA in settings.

jacobs

The Tax Schedule report is a special report that will report only the taxable info.

Alternatively, you could do two Category reports, one for taxable accounts and one for non-taxable accounts; just select which accounts to include by going to Edit, clicking on the Accounts tab, and selecting the accounts you want to include.

pamela77

Thank you Jacobs, you have been VERY helpful!

Catherine

I also have to click on the security, choose "Edit Security" and make sure all the securities in retirement accounts have the "Tax Free" box checked

jacobs

Catherine said:

I also have to click on the security, choose "Edit Security" and make sure all the securities in retirement accounts have the "Tax Free" box checked

@Catherine You should not need to do this. And it can cause you real problems if you hold the same security in a non-retirement account. You should only need to check that box if the security itself -- not the account -- is tax free, such as a tax-free bond fund.