We have shares from a DRIP (former employer) which we have just let sit for 17 years. 147 shares later we want to sell. How do we calculate the taxes on the sale? Pretty much all of the shares were Div Reinvested.
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Kerxc,
I would first ask your broker for your basis in each share. Sine about 2011 brokers are required to provide this information when you sell shares purchased after that date. Your broker may be a nice guy and do the dog work for the shares you bought before that.
But if you are the one to do the work, you can find history of stock shares at a “Historical Stock Lookup” site. Here is on such site, I used IBM as the stock. You can put in your date of interest and go.
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Talk to your tax person but for most people you will pay 15% of the long term capital gain. Or 0% if you’re lower income
Like clydewolf said - there should be a historical share price list by date on the plan site or the stock site. Unless, you are like me (OCD) and logged them for years and years on a spread sheet.
If you aren’t selling all of them - you go by the 1st In; 1st out prinicipal.
Unless you can identify specific block of them - like book entries from an inheritance which were put into the DRIP and I believe those can be identified for sale independently.
The DRIP holding would have a cumulative dividend payout figure. That would be the costs basis of the additional shares barring any stock splits maybe murking things up. If you can see the end of year reports for the past 17 years and tally the dividend payouts, you might have a handle on the cost basis. I am under the assumption that you paid taxes on the dividend payouts hence they are a cost basis. Others here probably might correct me on this. I am just going by the basic math of how I would look at it.