Qualified Dividends (15% Rate)

[Tom Meyer]

Cal, thought I'd give you one more challenge to think about.

I’m updating Qualified Dividends manually now.  I don’t think the manual changes are reflected in new Dividends as they role in.

Stock Dividends seem to be Non-Qualified or Qualified.  They're taxed at different rates.  Fidelity produces Year-to-date csv that provides a cusip and amount to summarize annual growth for Qualified Dividends as well as other tax related info by account.

Would it be feasible to modify F2O_DB.csv asset type to be something like STOCK-Q or STOCK-N instead of just STOCK?  The asset type could be updated as required from the Year-To-Date data.

If so, then “Other Income” could be updated as “Investment Income : Qualified Dividends”

This would help the tax reports to be more accurate.

Just a thought.

Tom (Texas)

[Cal Learner]

The investment types for OFX are fixed by the OFX spec. i.e., 'MF', 'STOCK', 'OTHER', 'OPT', 'DEBT'.  The spec has  a  <STOCKTYPE> defined that could go into a <STOCKINFO>....  Stock type could be : COMMON, PREFERRED, CONVERTIBLE, OTHER. BUT that is ignored by Money anyway.

Consider this: At the time the information comes in, it is not even known if this is going to end up as qualified or unqualified. Further, things that come in as dividends can also end up with part of the distribution being characterized as ROC (return of capital). That is  most of why your non-preliminary Fidelity 1099 is often not available until some time in March -- or at least mid February. It is also the cause of most corrected 1099s, although those are less common from Fidelity than they used to be.

You might compare what percent of your dividend distributions turned out to be qualified, unqualified, or ROC, and note those factors to use in your planning next year.

For most people,  the great majority for stock dividends turn out to be qualified.  Also, ROC and non-qualified work in opposite directions when it comes to estimating tax. You could classify your REITs as Other. That is a type.

Tip: make custom and favorite reports. Right-click into a report, and choose copy. The Paste into a spreadsheet. This is not particularly relevant to the topic, but it is useful in some tax planning. For example, I have a "Favorite" report that only includes foreign stocks dividends for the previous year. 

You could make a favorite report of stocks where the distributions are mostly non-qual. You could incorporate the sum from that report into you planning.