Investments that aren't stocks - help!

Hi Paul -

Last night I ended up doing that - with success. I wouldn't want to have to do it very often, but it can be made to work.

Here's the gory details, for those who might ever want to generate a rate of return for something other than a stock...

First, I used a Quicken "class" to tag -all- the transactions relating to a specific piece of real estate. (To apply the tag I ran Find/Replace a bunch... I -hope- I tagged them all.)

I then generated a Quicken transaction report, limited to that new tag class, sorted by date, and being careful not to include the register-to-register transactions twice in the report...

I exported the Quicken report to Excel ("Copy" button on the Quicken report, then pasted in Excel)...

In Excel, I then patched up the split-transactions that Quicken chose not to supply dates for in its transaction report (grrr, see below) (Excel

-really- needs to have the dates)...

I then applied the "XIRR" function in Excel to the transaction dates and amounts. And it gave what appeared to be a plausible number.

For a test of the above, I then created a dummy series of stock transactions in Quicken, to mimic one of the real estate transaction sequences, and asked Quicken for its opinion of the rate of return on that dummy stock.

And, lo and behold, when everything is done just right, the Excel-generated number for the real-estate is -identical- to the Quicken-generated number for the fake stock. Yay!!

Would'a'been nice if Quicken could have just done the IRR calculation itself

-- it has all the data just sitting there. Oh well.

Garry

PS - I had trouble with the split transactions because Quicken-2006 refused to allow me to turn off the report / Customize / Display / "Breakdown of split trans" checkbox. A bug in Quicken? (I'm -shocked-, -shocked-... :)