The Capital Gains and Losses Worksheet is the place to report your sales of assets such as mutual fund shares, stock, bonds, other securities, investment real estate and other capital items. As you enter information about a disposition, we compute the gain or loss for you and display the results in the last two columns.
Here's the best part: you don't have to figure out ahead of time which sales are long-term and which are short-term. We do that for you, and carry each transaction to the correct line and column of Schedule D.
Schedule D only has room for five short-term and five long-term sales. We enter additional sales on Schedule D-1.
Do not use this worksheet for the following types of sales and dispositions. Refer instead to the appropriate form as indicated below:
Sale of your home (use the Sale of Home Worksheet)
Installment sales (use Form 6252)
Like-kind exchanges (use Form 8824)
Sales of business property (use Form 4797)
Casualty/theft loss (use Form 4684)
Section 1256 contracts and straddles (use Form 6781)
Capital gains reported to you on Form 2439 (use Schedule D, line 11b)
Capital gain distributions (use the Dividend Income Worksheet)
You may have sold property on one date that you acquired through several different purchases. For example, you may have purchased AT&T shares on December 1, 1991, September 13, 1994, May 8, 1995 and June 6, 1997, and sold the entire block on April 4, 2010. The IRS instructions tell you that in general you should report that as one transaction, entering "various" in column (b) as the date acquired and April 4, 2010, as the date sold.
If some of the property was held short-term and some long-term (for example, if the third and fourth purchases described above took place after April 4, 2009), the IRS tells you to report that as two separate transactions, one short-term and one long-term, with "various" in column (b) for each.
If you have transactions like these to report, in order for us to know the holding period of property purchased at "various" times, use these codes for the acquisition date:
"var-s" if the holding period is short-term
"var-L" if the holding period is more than 12 months.
When we enter the transactions on Schedule D, we will convert the codes to "various" to keep the IRS happy.
Gain or loss from the sale of inherited property is always considered to be long-term. Just enter "inherit" as the acquisition date, and we'll do the rest.
Here is how we figure out whether a transaction is a short-term or a long-term sale.
If you entered "inherit", "var-L" for the acquisition date, the transaction is long-term.
If you entered "var-s" for the acquisition date, the transaction is short-term.
Next, we examine the dates you entered in columns (b) and (c). If the acquisition took place in 2008, the transaction is long-term. If it took place in 2009, and if the month and date of the acquisition are earlier in the year than the sale date, the transaction is long-term.
If the sale date precedes the acquisition date (this can happen with some sophisticated trading techniques), we assume the sale is short-term.
If you enter either of these codes in column (g) we know the sale results in 28% rate gain or loss:
Code C, for collectibles,.
Code S, for qualified small business stock. See the IRS instructions for the definition. These sales are eligible for a 50% exclusion of gain. To claim the exclusion, enter a transaction on the next line with the same description, acquisition and sale dates, but enter 50% of the gain as the cost, and 0 as the sale proceeds. Put code S in column (g), and we'll enter a loss on Schedule D or D-1 to offset 50% of your gain.
Personal property means a vacation home, a car, or anything else you owned just for personal use. If you sell a personal use item at a loss, you are not allowed to deduct the loss. Enter code P in column (g) and we'll know to disallow your loss when we enter the transaction on Schedule D or D-1.