First, I'll reference a post made to an existing discussion in January 2026:
Again, I'll reiterate that, at least for me, this tool doesn't work (it did at one time, but that was many years ago). I'm running on Quicken Classic Business & Personal R67.10 27.1.67.10, which is right up to date. I'll make up some numbers to illustrate my problem. The Tax Planner says I owe $29,718 (Remaining Tax Due) based on, among other things, a current YTD LT Capital Gains of $202,658. I then run the CG Estimator tool, manually selecting a couple stocks with unrealized LT capital gains totaling $83,514. The results come back indicating an Estimated State Tax Impact of $4,510, but an Estimated Federal Tax Impact of $0 (I wish!!!). Backtracking, the Tax Rates in the CG Planner are set to "Use Tax Planner rates (31% / 20%) for Federal, and 5.4% / 5.4% for State. The $4,510 State Tax impact above would be correct ($83,514 x 0.054), but it looks like the Federal rates are not coming thru from the planner (the result is as if the Fed Rate were 0%). OK - I figured I'd try using the rates that it shows from the planner for Federal (31% / 20%), and just plug them in as Custom. That works, except it now doesn't bring any data at all from the planner (the result is an increase in Federal Tax of $16,703 ($83,514 * 0.20). The problem is that "Total Capital Gains before Proposed Sales:" now shows nothing at all, while "Federal Tax Before Proposed Dale:" shows the correct figures for ST and LT gains, the correct Marginal Tax Rate, but $0 for the tax. In other words, it appears that selecting "Custom" for the federal tax rate uses those rates on the proposed sale, but fails to bring across the tax thus far (even though the ST and CG gains DO come forward. The work around for this, which I've done for years, is to just take the LT and/or ST gain/loss of the proposed sale(s) and add them to the data in the TAX PLANNER (using the "User Entered" override for ST and LT gains. BTW, when I do this the Federal Tax goes from $29,718 to $45,419, an increase of $15,701 (not quite the $16,703 increase represented by just taking the LT CG of proposed sale and using the 20% CG maximum rate), which is actually correct.
Just another FYI - when trying the various different scenarios in the Capital Gains Estimator above, the Tax Planner "Remaining Tax Due" got changed from $29,718 to $68,802 (yikes!!) and wouldn't reset until I closed Quicken and reopened. The CG Estimator is really a piece of crap. What Quicken should do is use the Tax Planner code (assuming the underlying code is discrete) as an engine to determine the resulting increase/decrease in tax based on proposed sales. The Tax Planner is actually pretty accurate.
