R56.9 Tax Planner Enhanced for Taxable Social Security
I see that Tax Planner now calculates the taxable portion of your Social Security automatically in R56.9. Heretofore I was adding a manual adjustment for this.
Nice feature added to R56.9
You Don't Have to Have a Point, To Have A Point
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Strange, I have R56.9 and I'm not seeing that, it is showing the full amount. This was also not mentioned in the release notes.
EDIT: My mistake, I see it now. The full amount goes on the Taxable Social Security Benefits line, but the Total Other Income or Loses has the nontaxable part removed.
Nice!
Well, sort of nice. I see that it is assuming 85% of our Social Security is taxable. Ran the same through a Social Security tax calculator and it says that only 41% is taxable (EDIT: found this was a calculator for last year, for this year it is 38%).
In retrospect this is worse for anyone that doesn't have the income to push the tax to 85% because now instead of a simple adjustment the correct percentage, you have to now compensate for the 85% number.
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Compounding the problem is that the taxable Social Security income fraction is based on Modified Adjusted Gross Income. MAGI includes non-taxable municipal bond interest which is not even tracked in Tax Planner. It was better when the taxable amount was left for the user to calculate based on their own situation.
Adding- this change shows a total lack of knowledge regarding the calculation at issue and could not have been introduced in an environment that required some form of testing prior to being released. If it were tested or discussed, it would have been obvious that tax planner does not have the data required to make an accurate calculation.
Workaround for Those of us that use a scheduled reminder with taxable/non-taxable split categories- Add the non-taxable split amount to the RRA Soc Sec Ben field below SSI so the Total Other Income value sums to the expected amount. You cannot just add an adjustment to the Soc Sec field because the adjustment gets incorporated into the 85% calc. A User Entered amount is also impacted by 85%.
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I use User-Entered for Social Security income for the Tax Planner to have the actual taxable amount.
Deluxe R55.26., Windows 10 Pro
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Quicken is assuming 85% is taxable. 😐️ Not good. Well in my case that works for 2025 and therefore I thought they were actually doing a proper calculation.
However whoever decided to use a simple 85% rule needs to undo that change. Please properly inform us when it's released.
You Don't Have to Have a Point, To Have A Point
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guessing that Tax Planner is figuring for a worse case situation with “up to 85%” being taxable.
QWin - R54.16 - Win10
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That will get caught up in 85% calc too.
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It hasn't for me. It's been pretty exact in R55.26. Is it broken for user-entered as well in R56.9? If so, that kind of destroys the concept of User Entered.
Deluxe R55.26., Windows 10 Pro
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Yes, it is messed up for anyone that doesn't fall into the category of 85% taxed.
To do a "User Entered" you now have to figure out what that would be from an external tax calculator and then ratio it correctly to compensate for the total amount already being set to 85%.
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@Chris_QPW That's messed up. I guess I won't be updating to R56 anytime soon.
Deluxe R55.26., Windows 10 Pro
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This totally undocumented change is VERY CONFUSING!
With this change, the numbers in the Other income section of the Tax Planner do not add up because it is using 85% of the amount on the "Taxable Social Security benefits line.
At an absolute minimum they should change the caption in the Tax Planner to say "Total Social Security benefits" not "Taxable" and explain somewhere that they assume 85% of the total is taxable. Much better would be to provide a place where you can enter your taxable percentage.
QWin Premier subscription5 -
I like The idea of entering a percentage. Given the complexity of this stuff I doubt they would ever get the rules correct. Therefore allowing the user to just enter the percentage would be the best way to implement it.
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Please do not alter the values of User-Entered.
Deluxe R55.26., Windows 10 Pro
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Please do not alter the values of User-Entered.
@leishirsute If they implement the % taxed entry as described above and you don't want the user entered values to be altered, you could set it to 100%.
QWin Premier subscription0 -
@Jim_Harman That would work. Although the concept of User_Entered sort of diminishes.
Deluxe R55.26., Windows 10 Pro
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Let's face it, the reason for "User Entered" is for correcting the data, if there is another way for the data to be correct then there really isn't a need for "User Entered". Of course, they should leave it because of all the different kinds of possibilities that can come up, but I don't think they should worry about it in this case.
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The reason I use User-Entered is to put the numbers in that I want to use regardless what quicken offers. Sometimes, Quicken data is not used to collect amounts used in the tax planner. I may want to just put in the numbers I want, not what Quicken wants. It's not about correcting Quicken data for me. Prior to using the Tax Planner, I was using a spreadsheet. Then I saw I could put in the numbers with User-Entered in the Tax Planner and that saved time. As you stated earlier, I can use an amount that compensates for the Planner's calculation. Sort of working around a deficiency.
User-Entered makes the Tax Planner generically usable even without having to import Quicken data.
Deluxe R55.26., Windows 10 Pro
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I'm sorry, I was thinking of the wrong thing. I was thinking of the "Adjustment" entry. Clearly "User Entered" should override anything that Quicken does.
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I enter my calculated taxable amount on the "Taxable Social Security Benefits" line of the tax planner as User Entered. I am not seeing any reductions elsewhere. That is, the Other Income Gains and Losses is 0. Am I looking in the wrong place? On R56.9
EDIT: Ok now I see it. It is just buried in the total and not where I expected it to be. Agree with other comments that this is really screwed up!
Quicken Business & Personal Subscription, Windows 11 Home
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