Tax Planner Issue

phorsting

The Tax Planner projects scheduled transactions to predict yearly tax categories. It works fine for full year scheduled transactions, but it does not honor the end date for scheduled transactions. So a transaction that is scheduled to end in February, will get a 12 month projection.

markus1957

A specific example would be helpful. I use many scheduled reminders and they project the appropriate values within their defined date ranges.

phorsting

My mistake. It is my Social Security Paycheck tracking reminder that is not projected properly in the Tax Planner. There appear to be two problems. 1. There is no end date option in the Paycheck tracker reminder. 2. The Tax Planner doesn't account for the fact that taxes are only due on 85% of the Social Security benefit.

You might ask why would I have an end date on Social Security. It's because I've changed direct deposit accounts mid year, so I'm using two Paycheck tracker reminders, one for the first two months to one account and one for the last 10 months to the second account.

markus1957

My suggestion would be to use a scheduled income reminder rather than a paycheck reminder. You have the option of specifying an end date with those. Set up splits in the reminder category to account for the taxable and non-taxable portions of your social security payment. For my scheduled reminder, I created taxable and non-taxable SSA Income categories and assigned the tax line that reports to Tax Planner to the taxable category. Withholding and Medicare premiums can also be added to the split window.

The tax planner does not track all of the income that goes into the calculation to determine the taxable portion of social security income, so the user has to figure it out and apply it manually. If you know it's 85%, then it is easy to create the category and tax line assignments necessary for tax planner to include the correct amount of income in the overall tax projection.

phorsting

Thanks, that's very helpful