account structure for spouse and children

[Jonathan Goldman]

I saw in the cookbook document this mention of how to organize accounts:

Over time, I’ve iterated over many ways of defining my account names and I have converged to the following convention for Assets, Liabilities, and Income accounts:
Type : Country : Institution : Account : SubAccount

My question is what are recommendations for handling spouse accounts and children. Specifically, if you have a spouse and kid and have IRAs or HSAs what is the a good structure to follow?

Suppose these are the accounts you have:

Asset:US:Fidelity:Brokerage:...(joint)

Asset:US:Fidelity:HSA:Spouse1

Asset:US:Fidelity:HSA:Spouse2

Asset:US:Fidelity:IRA:Spouse1

Asset:US:Fidelity:IRA:Spouse2

Asset:US:Fidelity:529:Child1

Asset:US:Fidelity:529:Child2

Asset:US:Schwab:IRA:Spouse1

Asset:US:Schwab:IRA:Spouse2

I can imagine one kind of analysis is to aggregate by IRA and spouse but maybe not include children and look across institutions. This is possible with the right SQL query but just wondering if this structure is ok or if there is a better/simpler structure when building accounts to track all finances for a family.

thanks in advance!

[Patrick Ruckstuhl]

Hi,

I'm actually separating it at the root level. e.g. I have

Assets:Joint:US:Fidelity:Brokerage
Assets:Spouse1:US:Fidelity:HSA
Assets:Spouse2:US:Fidelity:HSA

I haven have income/expenses tracked that way

Income:Joint:Food
Income:Spouse1:BankFees
Income:Spouse2:BankFees

That way I can with a simple prefix where statement limit it.

Regards,

Patrick

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[Aamer Abbas]

I'm doing it at the leaf level rather than the root level. I think it depends on how you want to aggregate expenses. Do you care about aggregating expenses by person or by category? Personally speaking, I care more to know how much we spent on dining out in total rather than knowing how much my spouse spent across categories in total. For this reason, I do it at the leaf level (Expenses:Dining:Spouse) rather than root (Expenses:Spouse:Dining).

Ultimately, you can slice and dice however you want using queries, but this makes it easy for me to visualize category-level expenses in Fava.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/170a38cb-368c-0b83-458a-1ff7a470f3b6%40ch.tario.org.

[kuba jamro]

Don't have much advise for accounting with a spouse as our money is our money so there is no need for separation in my case.

And my child's money is my child's money, especially the money that's in an ISA/IRA, so for me it is tracked as an Expense.

If I was inclined to track my child's money I would have a separate beancount file for that purpose.

Kind regards
Jakub.