Ability to include any/all Investment Transaction in Reports and the Spending Plan (edited)

SRC54 · January 9

If your income dividend is a payment, then it will be in the Spending Plan; if it is a reinvestment, which essentially is a transfer, it will not be included in the Spending Plan. This is the behavior most of us want. Fidelity does Income Dividend as a payment, but other firms might not. It is very dependent on how the brokerage downloads your transactions.

For example, I have 3 mutual bond funds that pay me dividends that I spend each month to supplement my income. These end up in my Spending Plan. Then when one of these buys more shares in the fund, it is excluded.

You can try to teach Simplifi what you want, but it is really hard for Simplifi to tailor to every users needs. Assuming you don't have a lot of these, and it's every month, I suggest you just edit it to meet your situation. I used to have duplicates later, which I deleted, but this seems to be happening less lately.

skgdogs · January 21

I concur. I'd like the ability to include Interest and Dividends from Investment Accounts as Income in the Spending Plan. I have six investment accounts at JPM and I would like the interest and dividends from three of these accounts to report as Income on the Spending Plan without manually changing each transaction to Payment/Deposit. I'm retired and this is my only source of income other than SS.

rayhooker · February 18

I can't speak for all, but I would imagine the biggest gap here is the inability to generate a tax report that considers the income in a brokerage account. Personally not including activity in the brokerage in the spending plan nor normal reports makes sense. That way only transfers to your regular accounts are included in the spending plan or normal reports. OTOH the tax reports are designed for tax planning so not doing them like Classic Quicken doesn't make sense. Even the workaround to add dummy transactions to include the income in these accounts seems like it could create a mess in the long run as well as subject the user to mistakes. It would be much better to generate the info from the brokerage accounts directly. For now only the Classic Quicken tax report is of any real use for me.

Ray Hooker

nogorman · February 26

I am retired, so my investments provide my income. These include interest, dividends, short/long- term capital gains. I would like to see these in a REPORT for income for 2024. Unavailable.

a_user · April 1

I just started using Simplifi and most of the reason is to track passive income - mostly dividends. This is a very needed feature. I have more than 100 dividend transactions on the last day of each month that I have to manually and individually edit to be able to track the income. It won't be worth it to continue this subscription if there isn't a better way to handle this.

RobWilk · April 1

Before i vote for this: When someone says "investment income" here do they mean change in value of investment amounts, or actual income that might be usable as if it were in a checking account? If it's like it's in a checking account, does that "cash account" specificallly not support spending plan income? Or, is there a transfer from the investment to the 'cash account' that is not mark-able as income for spending plan purposes? I might vote for this, i just want to understand.

SRC54 · April 1

@a_user @rayhooker You have a good point. If one is going to use the taxes report, these really need to be included. And if you have a 100 per month, changing them one by one is a chore.

I was able once to change mine by a bulk edit by first clicking on Exclude from Spending Plan and/or Report and then clearing it. See if this will work for you. I was told this was not really supposed to work, but it did for me about a month ago when all my Dividends got excluded going back 2-3 years after an update.

danielkeisling · April 1

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/comment/50262#Comment_50262

We are referring to dividends, not change in value. For example, I have an investment account that holds shares in a money market fund (SPAXX). On the last day of the month I receive additional funds in my account that corresponds to the interest rate of how much I was holding that month. Some people just let it reinvest back into their funds, but others want to mark this as income (I categorize mine as Personal Income:Dividend Received).

RobWilk · April 1

Thanks for clarifying, Adding my vote.

SRC54 · July 8

I had forgotten about this suggestion. Just allowing them in reports and spending plan as is currently done with deposits and payments shouldn't require a lot of work for the programmers. It would only require users to add dividend categories.

Since users now have the option to exclude any account's transactions from SP/Reports, maybe these all should be included by default now.

rabate · October 18

I would really like to see investment dividends and interest included in reports without changing them to payment/deposits. I certainly don't want to do it manually.

flintster_99 · November 21

A simple solution to this would be to allow investmentment transactions to be assigned a Category like every other account (and allow rules - but at least assiging a category would allow reporting)

You currently can do this by changing the transaction in the investment account to 'payment/deposit' action (which magically reveals the cargory option - even though it's still a transaction in an investment account..)

DannyB · November 21

I certainly don't know how everyone has their investment accounts set up, but for me including interest and dividends in my investment account whether IRA, Roth IRA, 401 (k), etc, as income for Spending Plan purposes just doesn't make sense. First off, I don't spend any funds directly out of my investment accounts to cover any of my monthly planned or other spending. Secondly, it makes better sense to me that all interest and dividend income in my investment accounts, be reinvested for investment growth purposes and for future use.

If I want funds from any one of my investment accounts to be available for Spending Plan purposes, I'll transfer those funds to one of my cash accounts and include that transfer as income to my Spending Plan.

SRC54 · November 22

I agree that I would want to exclude Retirement Accounts except for distributions and transfers of course, which is how it works now.

However, users should have the choice of ignoring Brokerage accounts or not. Frankly, since it is taxable income, it needs to show up in the Reports especially the Tax Report. Also, as many have mentioned, as a retiree I live off some of these dividends.

Since I don't reinvest the dividends (most of them) in my brokerage, I am able to make it into a payment/deposit and I use my own Dividends category so it DOES show up in Spending Plan and the Tax Report. It isn't that big a deal for me, but many people have a lot more AND even if you plow them back into a reinvestment, the dividends are still taxable.

I think the obvious solution is to allow users to decide on the account level whether to include/exclude their transactions. Locking the exclusion in doesn't make sense.

flintster_99 · November 22

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/comment/61675#Comment_61675

I see what you are saying. My request is mostly around reports. I'm newly retired and not drawing down retirement funds, but need to know how much income my portfolio (both pre and post tax accounts) is generating for planning purposes - right now there is no way to do that that I can find in simplifi. I can get it from brokerages but there are multiple and it's a pain.....

Ability to include any/all Investment Transaction in Reports and the Spending Plan (edited)

Comments

Categories