Retirement and other stocks

[KS4220]

Hello,

Last year I entered all my stock purchases and sales by hand. What a chore! Is there an automatic way to do it that does not expose my retirement account and password to possible hacking?

[Opus 17]

No.  You can either provide your login details and let Turbotax download the data from the broker, or you can type it in by hand from your broker tax statement.  Whether providing your login details "compromises" your account depends on the internal security protocols of both your broker and Turbotax.  I don't believe your broker account is at any greater risk from giving your password to Turbotax than it is just by existing in the first place.**   You could always log in via turbotax, download the tax details, and change the password on your broker account immediately after. 

**There are 3 basic reasons that accounts get hacked.

1. Bad password security by the user.  Using simple passwords, or re-using the same passwords on multiple sites. 

2. User falls for a phishing attempt.

3. Password file at the web site is stored in an insecure format.

1 and 2 are your responsibility, and #3 is not something you can fix, either your broker is secure or they aren't, and if they aren't, maybe you need to change brokers. 

[BettieG]

Hi!  Great question! 

You already know that you can import your brokerage statement into TurboTax, but depending on what brokerage you have, you may have to enter your user name and password in order to accomplish this.  I understand that you don’t necessarily want to do that for security reasons.  If you chose to do that, however, you would have the option of identifying the specific account(s) you wanted to import into TurboTax.

Apart from importing your transactions, however, you can also include your transactions in TurboTax by entering a summary for each sales category, using your brokerage statement which includes a summary of your transactions, grouped by sales category.  Please see this article for specific instructions about how to do that:  How do I enter a large number of stock transactions in TurboTax?

I hope this is helpful!