Realized Gain in Roth

msgchef

In a Roth account, I sold a mutual fund and purchased a different fund, no funds were withdrawn. Qmac is treating the sale as a realized gain which IMO not a gain since nothing cashed out. the account is set as a Roth, don't know where else to look. thx for help in advance

jacobs

When you sell shares in a Roth IRA account, there is a gain or loss associated with that sale — it's just not a taxable gain/loss. In some circumstances, people might want to see the gain on the investment, even though it's not taxable. So… Where is it showing as a Realized Gain?

In any of the Tax reports, retirement accounts are excluded by default, so there should be no realized gain from the sale in the Roth account in a tax report.

If you're looking at just a Category report, then you will see the gain, because the Category report is not paying attention to the types of accounts or their tax consequences. But you can edit the Category report to no include your retirement accounts if that's what you want.

msgchef

thx, I first noticed it in the dashboard. Income/expense, my August income shot up, clicking thru it a report showed up categorizing that sale as Realized Gain or course it doesn't show the subsiquent purchase of a new mutual fund as an expense. I've done an 'internal" sale and buy in IRA;s before and the sale never showed up as income. I guess I'm wondering why now and only this account. Appreciate any insights.

jacobs

The Dashboard doesn't currently allow users to specify which accounts to include/exclude. So it makes sense that realized gains from a sale of securities in any account, including an IRA account, would show up as income in the Income & Expense card. And the purchase of a different security with the proceeds of the sale should not be counted as an expense, because security purchases are never expenses.

Had your transactions been in a non-retirement brokerage account, it would be correct for the sale to be counted as income, because that's the way accounting and tax laws work — the realized gain replaces a previous unrealized gain, and your subsequent purchase has reset your basis. But in a retirement account, it makes no sense to see realized gains as income because the exchange of realized gain for the previously unrealized gain happened within the bubble of a tax-deferred or tax-exempt account, so there's actually no reportable income.

The Quicken Mac product manager has said that they will be adding some user controls regarding accounts for Dashboard cards in a future release. This issue came up when the Income & Expense card was introduced in the version 6.12 release back in February, and many users wanted to exclude retirement income, or all investing income, in order to see their "operating" income versus their expenses. We don't know what amount of settings controls they will be adding, nor when it will be released; all we know is that we've been told that it's coming.

msgchef

thank you