Thanks for the inputs! I just ordered J. K. lasser's Your Income Tax 2002 and plan to get busy once it arrives!
TRDRMAX, I've been using Quicken Home and Business and Turbo Tax Deluxe. I am not really satisfied with either. I trade through IB and quicken does not handle the downloads especially well as regards shorts etc. I hear Green Trader (?) is pretty good. Next I don't know how Turbo Tax is going to handle form 4797 Turbo Tax will put things on schedule D for you but I am not sure about Mark To Market and form 4797. Crunching all this stuff by hand is a real pain in the @(*&&^^$%#. Not having checked things out...I think you put your net profits on 4797 and attach all your trades to your return...the million dollar question for me is what do you put your trades onto to attach to your return? Is it an additional section of form 4797 or do you use a schedule D ( which I know quicken will do) or do you just list them on some paper. What software can you recommend or shed some light on ?
Vinigar, You are right on the 4797 for your trades. I am assuming when you enter in the system that you can keep adding trades that will then print on supplemental sheets. I use Kiplinger software to do my taxes. I am not sure it will handle shorts or other transactions any better than Turbo Tax. For instance I had a ton of options that I sold last year that expired worthless. Even though I coded them with an X for expired option, the system flagged every trade for a cost basis. One solution may be to use Excel, I use IB and see they have an export to excel option. Im still on yellow-tablets myself, but you can do some pretty useful stuff with a little excel talent. I will set up a dummy return or try to with Kiplinger, including some business expenses. I will see how it flows and post the results. You may want to try the same with turbo tax. Look for it on Friday night, since I have been kicked to the curb for the evening. I looked at the green trader website, and have seen several posts of other traders recommending them. All in all it looked like a decent site with some sound advice mixed in with some promos. I don't know the cost of the software, but it looks like Barrons has done a review. That may be a viable option depending on your situation.
Trdrmac, I am trading with TradeStation and have only received paper copies of the transactions. Within TradeStation, one can list a history of transactions and then copy and paste these transactions into an xl Spreadsheet. However, I do not believe that there is a way to transfer this into, for example, turbotax. Do you know of any way to import from xl into a tax program (such as turbotax or kiplinger)? For example, even an intermediate step of xl to qif (?) to turbotax would be fine. Thanks
I looked at Microsoft Money and it does appear you would be able to import a qif file of your trades. From there you should be able to be able to export to Turbo Tax or Tax Cut. This is an extra step I would have hoped to avoid, but may be a way to make sure the trades are setting up correctly in the software. I checked Tax Cut import section and did not see a direct import from excel. But they did have a direct import from brokers this year, it was pretty slim picking this year like four brokers, but I am sure that will catch on. Tradestation was not one that I remember. Glad you got the JK Lasser text, you should get some good ideas out of it. The Greentrader site I was on last night had some interesting reading, you may want to check that out as well. Regards
unfortunately, the missing step is getting the information out of XL and into a QIF format (Intuit has not been very helpful in this area either, since it is their format for importing into TurboTax). I'll poke around a bit more and post an additional findings. Likewise, if anyone else has thoughts on getting from XL into an off-the-shelf (i.e. TurboTax) tax program, please let me know.
I can't think of a specific source. The ones that come to mind are Florida, Tennessee, Delaware and Nevada. If you hit the Kiplinger or Turbo Tax websites, you may be able to back into it by seeing which states they don't sell software for. Assuming of course you paid more attention in geometry class than I did.
Vinny sorry about Delaware, I thought they were on a strait sales tax. But in looking at NC, I think I need to find one of those tax free states myself. I knew I was getting killed, but now Im really depressed.