Here is a handy tool to help you calculate your cost basis for stocks that you receive as a spinoff from a stock that you already own. In the usual situation of a tax-free spinoff, you need to allocate part of your cost basis in the original stock to the shares of stock that you received in the spinoff and also compute the gain or loss for any cash you received in lieu of fractional shares.
These are just some of the recent spinoff transactions for which the calculator has data ready for you:
America Movil (from Telefonos de Mexico) Ameriprise (from American Express) Ascent Media (from Discovery Holdings) Brink's Home Security (from Brink's Co) Broadridge Finl (from Automatic Data Proc) Citadel Broadcasting (via Disney) Clearwater Paper (from Potlatch) Discover Financial (from Morgan Stanley) Dr Pepper Snapple Group (from Cadbury) Embarq (from Sprint Nextel) Fairpoint Communications (from Verizon) Fortune Brands Home & Security (from Beam) Frontier Communications (from Verizon) Hanesbrands (from Sara Lee) John Bean (from FMC Technologies)
Click on the spinner below to access the cost basis calculator tool for stock spinoffs.
Spinoff Calculator
Kraft Foods (from Altria) Lender Processing (from Fidelity Natl) Lone Pine Resources (from Forest Oil) Metavante (from Marshall & Ilsley) Patriot Coal (from Peabody Energy) Philip Morris Intl (from Altria) Spectra Energy (from Duke Energy) Sunpower Class B (from Cypress) Telmex Internacional (from Telmex) Teradata (from NCR Corp) Tim Hortons (from Wendy's) Treehouse Foods (from Dean Foods) Western Union (from First Data) Zep (from Acuity Brands)
You can also enter your own data.
Check back with us in November 2011 when we will have the Exelis and Xylem spinoffs from ITT Corp ready for you.
The calculator also has data for TAXABLE spinoffs, such as those listed below with the following cost basis per share: Brookfield Infrastructure Partners $20.56 Digimarc Corp (new) $7.56 Nortel (from BCE) (U.S. tax treatment) $117.38 RXi Pharmaceuticals (from CytRx) $8.84 Ship Finance Intl (3/22/07 spinoff from Frontline Ltd) $26.00 Vertus Investment Partners (from Phoenix) $9.52
If you know of other spinoffs, please help us build our database for the benefit of all users. Please send us the details by email so that we can add it to the table of pre-filled values.
For owners of multiple tax lots, the calculator results must be manually adjusted. The fractional shares resulting from each tax lot should be added together because cash in lieu of fractional shares will be paid only on the remaining fraction. The calculator is not yet set up to handle this type of situation automatically, but check back for future enhancements.
