[moneydance] Registered Retirement Savings Accounts

[Edward Reid]

At 07:54 11/03/08 -0800, cashmeredoe-moneydance at yahoo.ca wrote:
>Monthly a set amount (percentage of total value as of beginning of year) 
>is transferred by the banking institution to a standard account.  The full 
>amount of this is considered taxable income.  How can this be recorded in 
>MD to show a reduction in the value of the Registered Account and also 
>record this as pension income in the banking account?

Interesting question. I will have the same issue eventually (although my 
tax-deferred account is called a SEP-IRA), but had never given it any thought.

My reaction, in my situation, is that I will simply create reports showing 
both regular income and transfers from the tax-deferred account to the 
standard account. With MD's rudimentary reporting it is impossible to get a 
clean report showing everything I need for tax purposes, so the need to 
report an extra sum is not a big deal.

The other way I can think of, which would allow you to accumulate all 
income in a single category or hierarchy of categories, is to enter two 
separate transactions for each transfer: an expense to a "tax-deferred 
withdrawals" category and income from some income category.

Possibly you might be able to tag both income and transfers with a common 
tag and report based on that tag. I haven't tried this, and MD's 
implementation of tags is so weak that I can't say which reports they work in.

All these methods have disadvantages, but I can't think of anything better.

Edward
-- 
Art works by Melynda Reid: http://paleo.org