Bonds-Taxes Question

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OldTown
Posts: 90
Joined: Thu Jan 15, 2015 1:01 am

Bonds-Taxes Question

Post by OldTown »

Is anyone aware of an online calculator or website that can give me a sense of how much in taxable distributions (in actual dollar amounts) generated annually by the Vanguard Total Bond Index fund within a taxable account and assuming a $50,000 investment? I'm trying to get a sense of much I'd have to pay in taxes each year for this investment but I don't know much in income, dividends, or capital gains distributions would occur on average each year in this fund. Thus, it's hard to see the real dollar impact in taxes. I was hoping there's an easy to use online calculator where you can just type in the name of the fund and amount of the investment and it'd spit out the dollar amount of the various taxable interest, dividends, or capital gains distributions for the fund for any given year.

Thanks.
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triceratop
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Re: Bonds-Taxes Question

Post by triceratop »

Have you seen this spreadsheet, from this thread? https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... edit#gid=0

BND is the ETF version of VBTLX and the numbers are therefore the same. Of course, that is for 2016. Future tax liabilities will be determined by yields.

Note: the state taxability of U.S. Treasury bonds may vary from state to state. Verify the calculations yourself. (Last year about 30% of income from BND was from Federal Government obligations)
"To play the stock market is to play musical chairs under the chord progression of a bid-ask spread."
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House Blend
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Re: Bonds-Taxes Question

Post by House Blend »

For Total Bond, you can get 10 years of distribution history from advisors.vanguard:
https://advisors.vanguard.com/VGApp/iip ... undId=0584

But it will be in dollars per share, so you'll have to do the calculations yourself. It's not that hard.

However, if you are compelled to work things out to four decimal places, state taxes will make things quite a bit messier--some fraction of the dividends will be exempt from state tax (with notable exceptions such as California) and that fraction will vary from year to year. You can get historical data on this here, but not 10 years worth:
https://advisors.vanguard.com/VGApp/iip ... ?year=2016

(Click on the link to "U.S. government obligations information".)

If 10% accuracy is good enough, just take the latest distribution yield and multiply by $50,000. Treat that as 100% Federally taxable and 70% state taxable. Cap gains distributions tend to be small and close to negligible, especially if your error bars are 10% wide.
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