TurboTax question

Has anyone experienced this?

TT 2006 Premier. When figuring 1099B for a stock sale, to figure the FIFO cost basis I entered all transactions, including DRiP's. During proof-reading, I found that for one transaction, I entered .3000 instead of .0300 (at $2.70). The Tax Owed calculator jumped a difference of $1,558.00 for .27 of one share at $89.853 per share. I re-did it several times with the same result each time. I am not a tax expert (except at paying and paying them), but I am assuming something may be wrong. Any comments?

Reply to
mookie
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Hi, Mookie.

For the past few years, I've used only the Basic versions of Quicken and TurboTax. Maybe the Premier versions are different. I assume that you also are using Quicken, although you didn't say that.

In Quicken, when I sell stock, especially one where I have multiple lots - and most especially when I'm selling less than all my shares - I click the Specify Lots button on the Sell transaction screen. Then, for FIFO, I start with the oldest lot and just keep clicking to add the next oldest lot until Quicken says I have enough to equal the number of shares sold; the last lot probably will be only a part of the shares in that lot. The major advantage of this is that Quicken takes care of any rounding issues. This would be especially useful for something like fractional shares in a DRiP.

Then, to get the information from Quicken to TurboTax, Import the information into TT. You could print out a capital gains report from Quicken and enter the details into TT, but there would still be the risk of rounding errors. However, if you enter the actual dollars of basis that Quicken reports, and the actual dollars of proceeds from the sale, your reported gain should be correct, even if the number of shares is off slightly. You pay tax on the dollars of gain, of course, not on the number of shares.

RC

Reply to
R. C. White

RC ~

I appreciate the Reply. Yes, I use Quicken (for many years). This year I chose to simply enter from scratch as opposed to importing from Quicken as my previous imports have always required tweaking. I wanted to see the difference. Apparently I found it! I will try the import and see what happens. Again, thanks.

Rich

Reply to
mookie

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