Joint Accounts and Net Worth

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Hi. I’ve been using Tiller for all of two days, so please forgive me if my questions are naive and uninformed. In any case, so far Tiller is awesome for me, modulo some nits.

My first nit is that I am the trustee of a trust in which I own 50%. I’d like to track transactions in the trust account using Tiller, but there are some worries about doing that. E.g., I only want half of the value of the trust to count towards my net worth.

I’m guessing that when I distribute money out of the trust to the beneficiaries of the trust (i.e., my brother and me), I can split the money transferred out so that the funds that are transferred to me are categorized as “Transfer” of type “Expense”, and that the funds that are transferred to my brother are categorized as “Distribution” of type “Transfer” (or some such).

I’m pretty sure that this will work just fine, so the only remaining question is how do I get my “Balances” sheet to only include half of the value of the trust account in my net worth?

Well, there is one more snafu: For tracking tax burdens, if I AutoCat income in the trust account into some category that is designed to denote income that I have to pay taxes on, I’d want to also auto-split the income into my share of the income and my brother’s share. Is something like that possible?

And, as a tangentially related question, I have a lot of “net worth” that is in IRAs and 401ks, etc. While I want this money to count towards my net worth, because I haven’t yet paid taxes on it, I want to discount it when applied to my net worth by like 35%, or what have you.

I.e., since when I actually take money out of the tax-deferred accounts, this transfer comes with a big tax burden, I don’t want those taxes that I’m going to have to pay to be included in my net worth, so I’d like to multiply the money in the tax deferred accounts by 0.65, or so, when calculating my net worth. (I understand that I don’t know what my precise tax burden will be until it comes, but I’m happy enough to get in what I feel is the right ballpark.)

Thanks in advance!

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Hi @DarkWater,

Welcome to Tiller. I’m in my 13th month of using it and am very happy with its functionality.

Perhaps you could split the trust distributions into two transactions, yours and your brother’s (using Extensions>Tiller Money Feeds>Split Transaction). You could use a Category of Trust Fund, Group = Trust or Investments (or whatever you like,) Type = Transfer, and Hide from Reports for your brother’s share so those transactions are hidden from your Budget sheet. I don’t know if that will also hide them from your Balances sheet and exclude them from your net worth because I’m not in that situation; you might have to play around with it a bit or someone else here can answer.

You could utilize Tags and the Tags Report to further differentiate between your and your brother’s trust distributions. This document is useful: Docs: Tags Report for Transaction Tagging

I hope this is helpful. I don’t have the expertise to address your other concerns, but I’m sure that others here will be able to offer suggestions.

Good luck!
Rebecca

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Hi Rebecca,

Thanks. Yes, I think that splitting distributions will work well you as you suggest. I’m still left, however, with how to solve the problem of wanting to multiply the value of the trust account by 0.5 in calculating my net worth, and also doing the same for pre-distribution taxable income in the account.

I suppose that tracking taxable income is difficult in other ways too. I would need several different categories. At least one for income that is taxed at normal rates and one that is taxed at capital gains rates, so adding more categories to solve this issue I guess is no biggie. Except that I’m not even sure how it could be done for capital gains, since I don’t see anything that I know of for dealing with capital gains on stock sales, etc.

I suppose that one could split a stock sale into two categories: one that represents the cost basis and one that represents the gain. But unless there is some standard way of dealing with this, tracking my tax burden using Tiller seems like an uphill battle.

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Hi @DarkWater - I can offer an idea for this part of your question-

If you’re open to some modifications of your Balances sheet (not Balance History), you could display adjusted values for certain accounts in two ways.

By the way, it may be a good idea to start by making a copy of the Balances sheet to test the changes and keep the original untouched.

  1. The simplest approach if you only care about seeing the final Net Worth number reflecting the reduced levels of one or two subaccounts would be to put an adjusted Net Worth figure in cell G5 as in the suggestion in this thread.

https://community.tillerhq.com/t/donor-advised-fund-on-balances-sheet-neither-assert-nor-liability-how-do-people-categorize-it/20559/2?u=kylet

  1. A slightly more involved (but not really THAT involved) way that would allow you to see the changes at the individual account level and easily make future adjustments would be to add an adjustment table to the far right as in my example screenshot. Put the Account ID (like those in Column K) and your adjustment factor.

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Then starting in cell B9, replace the formula with:

=LET(newbal, MAP($K$3:$K,$O$3:$O,LAMBDA(acctid,bal,bal*IFNA(INDEX($AB$3:$AB,MATCH(acctid,$AA$3:$AA,0),1),1))), newlookup, {$J$3:$J,$M$3:$M,$N$3:$N,newbal},
iferror(if(iserror(match(row($B9)-row($B$9),$J$3:$J,0)),if(iserror(match(row($B9)-row($B$9)+1,$J$3:$J,0)),{iferror(1/0),iferror(1/0),iferror(1/0)},{upper(vlookup(row(B9)-row(B$9)+1,$J$3:$L,3,false)),"Updated",sumproduct(($L$3:$L=vlookup(row($B9)-row($B$9)+1,$J$3:$L,3,false))*newbal)}),arrayformula(vlookup(row($B9)-row($B$9),newlookup,{2,3,4},false)))))

This just takes the values you entered into the table and makes a modified balance for the associated accounts that the original formula can use as it’s new lookup. I think this is a clean way to approach it because you don’t mess with any core sheets like Accounts or Balance History. You’re just telling it that for this report you want an adjustment to the Balances according to your adjustment factor table.

You could add a column to your table with the Account Name since the IDs won’t mean much at first glance. However I think using IDs as a primary reference is important because names can obviously change.

Make sure that the numbers look correct as I didn’t extensively test it. And something similar would need to be done on the Liability side from cell F9 down if you adjust any liability accounts.

If you need any help implementing it I’d be happy to assist.

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