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personal-finance/computing-taxes-with-beancount/ #19

Open utterances-bot opened 1 year ago

utterances-bot commented 1 year ago

Computing Taxes with Beancount — Red's Rants

This article is written for users in the US.

https://reds-rants.netlify.app/personal-finance/computing-taxes-with-beancount/

qcasey commented 1 year ago

Thanks for the awesome writeup! I'm learning I need to restructure a lot of my ledger before doing this automatically...

I noticed you've got an HSA, are you withholding your own taxes? I found I need to estimate my tax burden regularly (at least every quarter) and I'm still not sure how to best represent it in beancount. Do you just tally it up in a Liabilities: account?

qcasey commented 1 year ago

Oh wait nevermind, I just noticed your Expenses:Federal-Income-Tax:Withheld: account.

redstreet commented 1 year ago

Glad it's useful! That's right. if it is an amount I expect to pay but have not actually paid it in any way yet, I book it like so:

2022-06-10 * "I expect to pay this much for capital gains"
  Liabilities:Taxes:Federal-Income-Tax:Expected  -10.00 USD
  Expenses:Taxes:Federal-Income-Tax:Pending

If I've already paid it, I use the :Withheld or :Payments:Estimated or :Payments:Filing.

redstreet commented 1 year ago

BTW, a part of restructuring your ledger is modifying hierarchy, which becomes very easy if you write a script to rename accounts. (eg: using sed)