RRSP and associated Tax Liability

I'm not Canadian so I had to look up how RRSP accounts work, mechanically and I understand that your withdrawals from the account, sometime in the future after you retire, will be taxed, apparently at a rate dependent on whatever your TOTAL income in is each year in retirement? That is, the tax rate for the withdrawals from the account are not "fixed and known" at this time?

If that's the case then it's really impossible to know "today" what that future liability actually will be in the future, perhaps many years from now, and then how to "discount" those future dollars into "today's" dollars. I expect if you went to 3 financial planners to try to figure this out for you you'd get 3 (or more!) different answers based on guesses as to what your total income will be when you start to withdraw the funds, what the tax rates will be at that time, and what's the proper discounting factor to use to discount those future payments.

A retail personal financial accounting program just isn't up to that task.

Now there's nothing to stop you from making your own guesses and making entries into Quicken if you want to try and show that future liability in "today's" balance sheet. You'd could create a new Liability Account in Quicken called something like "Estimated RRSP Tax Liability" and a new tax expense Category called something like "RRSP Taxes" and, periodically, make entries into that Account and that Category as your estimate changes.

Remember, Quicken is a double-entry accounting program so any entry in any Account must be offset somewhere into other Accounts or Categories, so you'd be "expensing" those discounted, estimated, future payments today. Then sometime in the future after you retire and are actually making payments for those taxes you'd make an entry into your Chequing Account with the offset going against the balance in the Estimated RRSP Tax Liability Account.

I might leave that problem alone.