Before they got married, Tom Smith and Mary Brown each had a checking account at BofA and a brokerage account at Fidelity and kept their records separately in Quicken for almost 15 years. Their accounts were surprisingly similar, although not identical.
Life was good.
Then they got married and combined their financial lives. Now they want to combine their Quicken record-keeping into a single File. They're not sure at all about how to do it and are afraid they will make a mess of the history that relates to their investments. Now they are falling behind in their record-keeping and getting desperate. They want to get back on the Quicken bandwagon!
The day before they married, Tom and Mary each had a copy of Quicken
2004 and each had created a File, named respectively "Tom" and "Mary".
Each File has a Checking account with the exact same name ("BA Chk") and a Brokerage account with the same name, "Fidelity".
In each File, the Checking account is linked to the Brokerage account.
In each file, dividends are reinvested and interest is passed to the Checking account.
In each Brokerage account, there are both some unique investments and some similar investments, i.e., Tom's account holds shares of IBM, but Mary's does not. But both accounts DO hold shares of AAPL stock (and others) , which was purchased at different times and have different prices and have generated different transactions over time, e.g., reinvested dividends, sales, etc., That would make a difference when they sold their shares at a later date.
Each month they took the printed statement from the mail and manually entered the data. They had no online connections. They would enter the stock prices on the last day of the month, creating a stock price history going back almost 15 years. They used Q2002 and double- checked balances and by the end of each month, their Quicken accounting matched their paper statements to the penny. The Reports they could generate were very helpful.
Life was, indeed, good. (If a bit tedious...)
When they married in 2005, they closed Mary's checking and brokerage accounts and moved everything into Tom's existing accounts and closed Mary's old accounts. On the last day of 2004, Mary transferred her checking account balance over to Tom's checking account, and moved all the shares in the Fidelity account over to Tom's Fidelity account.
Until they married in December 2004, each had kept their records entirely separate. They were still using Q2002 and everything was up to date. They bought updates to Quicken for every year, but never installed them, so their data is still in the 2002 format.
As soon as they married, they combined the accounts at the bank and brokerage, but stopped entering data because they were not sure how to proceed. Each month a single statement came from the bank and from the brokerage, but they knew that the shares at the brokerage had varying histories and were unsure how to keep all of them straight.
Their goal is to create a single File named "Smith," with all of the assets and transactions of the two original separate files, "Tom" and "Mary," with all of the histories of the brokerage shares retaining their correct history. They are afraid that if they (somehow?) export/ import Mary's brokerage account into Tom's brokerage account, they will lose track of the histories of the respective AAPL, etc., shares.
Can anyone recommend a strategy?
Thanks for reading the problem...