Question Thread - June 05, 2020

When card applications ask for your income, how do you account for highly variable and unrealized investment income? I am having difficulty figuring this out. First, for taxable investment income it is hugely variable because I rarely realize capital gains. Usually it's tiny relative to my overall taxable income, but this year it's 80% of my overall taxable income and next year I expect it to be down again. But unrealized capital gains, split between taxable and nontaxable IRA/401k, average about 60% of my income if I include them, again with huge variation.

So should I use the most recent tax year (which would cause my reported income to spike severalfold for a year and then plummet), an average over past years (how many years), or some forward-looking guessing procedure? And how should I treat unrealized cap gains?

/r/churning Thread