Toad, I recommend getting Quicken and keeping track of your trades in Quicken as they happen. Then at the end of the year you can make a Capital Gains Report in Quicken. Call it Schedule D-1 Continuation Sheet. In minutes you'll have the biggest part of your taxes complete. I've heard of Accountants charging thousands for Schedule D alone.
First-year, newbie casual trader tax question
- Thread starter toad57
- Start date
Note: This entry applies to doing US Federal Income Taxes...
I did some digging and tried some trial versions of tools that were designed to do the 'wash sale' calculations... the one that I thought was best was Wash Sale Schedule D Generator.
Support was good: I got instant response to an email query about a small item and I followed the docs and everything worked fine!
I was able to 'highlight and copy' from IB monthly reports on the web screen, paste that text into a temporary document, then use Excel spreadsheet to import the text.
I had to reformat the IB report data in Excel... took just a few minutes to do some simple functions to get the data ready (hint: absolute value and if-then functions)
I then pasted a column at a time into another spreadsheet that was to be fed into the above tool. It took about 60 seconds of runtime on my PC once I pushed the 'go' button.
When done, I had 6 pages of form D-1 ready to attach to my schedule D.
To me, it was worth the $35 purchase price. Yea, I could sit and do them all by hand, or I could write some code to do the math, the problem was that I could never fully understand exactly how to do the wash sale calculation... the IRS documents were just a bit too vague for my taste.
If during 2003 I do any stock day trades I will use the same tool again, but for now am only looking at e-minis, so will probably not need it again.
Another tool (that I do not recall the name of) was entirely built as an Excel spreadsheet and was cumbersome, awful, etc. It had a bunch of help text embedded in the trial version of the spreadsheet and I found the whole thing to be quite marginal and confusing... I tried to follow the difficult instructions and gave up when I could not get it to work at all.
Gainskeeper was easy to use, but the costs increased with the number of trades to be processed - $35 flat cost for the whole shebang suited me much better. And with the Gainskeeper service, you are uploading all of your trade info to their site- something some people would be a bit reluctant to share.
Disclaimer: YMMV, consult a tax professional, do not use while in bathtub, etc. blah, blah.
Mr. Toad
I did some digging and tried some trial versions of tools that were designed to do the 'wash sale' calculations... the one that I thought was best was Wash Sale Schedule D Generator.
Support was good: I got instant response to an email query about a small item and I followed the docs and everything worked fine!
I was able to 'highlight and copy' from IB monthly reports on the web screen, paste that text into a temporary document, then use Excel spreadsheet to import the text.
I had to reformat the IB report data in Excel... took just a few minutes to do some simple functions to get the data ready (hint: absolute value and if-then functions)
I then pasted a column at a time into another spreadsheet that was to be fed into the above tool. It took about 60 seconds of runtime on my PC once I pushed the 'go' button.
When done, I had 6 pages of form D-1 ready to attach to my schedule D.
To me, it was worth the $35 purchase price. Yea, I could sit and do them all by hand, or I could write some code to do the math, the problem was that I could never fully understand exactly how to do the wash sale calculation... the IRS documents were just a bit too vague for my taste.
If during 2003 I do any stock day trades I will use the same tool again, but for now am only looking at e-minis, so will probably not need it again.
Another tool (that I do not recall the name of) was entirely built as an Excel spreadsheet and was cumbersome, awful, etc. It had a bunch of help text embedded in the trial version of the spreadsheet and I found the whole thing to be quite marginal and confusing... I tried to follow the difficult instructions and gave up when I could not get it to work at all.
Gainskeeper was easy to use, but the costs increased with the number of trades to be processed - $35 flat cost for the whole shebang suited me much better. And with the Gainskeeper service, you are uploading all of your trade info to their site- something some people would be a bit reluctant to share.
Disclaimer: YMMV, consult a tax professional, do not use while in bathtub, etc. blah, blah.
Mr. Toad