Forum Discussion
Can I use an Excel sheet like a subroutine
Interesting. It might be fun to sit down together some day. I'm a life member of AAII and used to actively use their Stock Investor Pro database; had developed an elaborate spreadsheet where I could compare any two companies in the same industry with one another and average for the category, on all kinds of metrics.... Then I moved from the Windows environment to Mac....
As a life member I still get the printed magazine from AAII, but frankly pay almost no heed to it.
I am active on the Motley Fool, where I've also been a member since the 1990s......pay a lot more attention there, although recently mostly to Options, which are fun. I do my options investing (for that matter all my other investing too) within the tax-sheltered environment of a traditional IRA, so there are no tax consequences until withdrawals, and then it is what it is. But I have created spreadsheets to assess various options strategies, to track the positions I have.... I'm having a ball doing it.
To your goal...have you looked at all into Excel's Scenario Manager tool? What you're trying to do might stretch the boundaries of that tool, but it might serve the purpose. I've not used it enough to give you any specific suggestions. Perhaps some others here in the techcommunity can.
Thank you mathetes,
The purpose of the workbook is to study the tax consequences of various types of investment strategies over time. I'm retired in my late 50's so I still have several options available. Budget/expense is just a load where money comes out of the system. The real question pertains to how to spend down the accounts while aggressively investing and avoiding excessive taxes (nice theory I know). AAII (American Association of Individual Investors) has studied this question a few times using a macro approach and concluded it is "generally best" to spend down from your taxable brokerage accounts, then IRA's then Roth accounts "in most cases". In my case my brokerage accounts yield modest qualified dividends and long term capital gains which qualify for the 15% tax rate. Further, different types of investments have different tax consequences, investment strategies and risk. You have correctly identified my tax sheet as it details the handling of each income type and their limits so I can assess this trade space. In its current form it is easily revised and can be incremented by year to some degree.
What I would like to do is study various investment, income, risk and withdraw strategies and the tax consequences as the tax rules are applied. I have it stuck in my head that the first sheet would calculate the types of income from various accounts and investment types, then the tax sheet would calculate and return the applicable tax for each year (like a subroutine). Then the first sheet would substract living expense then forecast the next year etc. Investment types and withdraw strategies would change with time. In this way I hope to look at net income, risk and taxes as I change the investment types and timing.
I'm thinking I will need to write a macro function to handle it this way but I was hoping someone might see an easier, more obvious approach.
Interesting. It might be fun to sit down together some day. I'm a life member of AAII and used to actively use their Stock Investor Pro database; had developed an elaborate spreadsheet where I could compare any two companies in the same industry with one another and average for the category, on all kinds of metrics.... Then I moved from the Windows environment to Mac....
As a life member I still get the printed magazine from AAII, but frankly pay almost no heed to it.
I am active on the Motley Fool, where I've also been a member since the 1990s......pay a lot more attention there, although recently mostly to Options, which are fun. I do my options investing (for that matter all my other investing too) within the tax-sheltered environment of a traditional IRA, so there are no tax consequences until withdrawals, and then it is what it is. But I have created spreadsheets to assess various options strategies, to track the positions I have.... I'm having a ball doing it.
To your goal...have you looked at all into Excel's Scenario Manager tool? What you're trying to do might stretch the boundaries of that tool, but it might serve the purpose. I've not used it enough to give you any specific suggestions. Perhaps some others here in the techcommunity can.
I think I became an AAII life member in the early 80's. I focus on dividend stocks in a brokerage account. Seems to be working very well, I am thinking I might significantly shift my investment approach this way but I really need to understand the tax consequences. The limits to the 15% qualified dividends and capital gains becomes the limiting factor. I've dabbled in options a bit but I wanted to study the dividend stock first.
Thanks for the tips. I will make a study of Scenario Manager tool along with VBA. The analyst on AAII must use one of these. I have tried to study a few of their sheets to see what they are doing in the past but did not understand what I was seeing.
Thank you for your input,