Placeholder entries

Cost is probably not as important in a retirement account since you're not going to pay capital gains taxes.

But you're right that if the fi removes shares to pay fees, but doesn't provide transactions to account for the removal of those shares, Quicken will offer to adjust the share balance for you, creating a placeholder if you say "yes". But you don't have to accept the offer of the adjustment.

It's your choice to keep your account accurate by manual means (where necessary); or to let Quicken do some, or all of the work for you (with the "Update 401(k) Holdings" wizard, you could probably avoid ever having to enter any "transaction" in the 401k account; you'd just have Adjust Share Balance entries for each security for each printed statement).

When we had contributions to a 401k where the administrator removed shares and didn't account for that removal (anywhere - not even in printed statements), I just computed the shares removed using the share balance the actual transactions produced and the share balance the fi reported; I entered a Shares Removed for that difference and put a note in the memo field. [I don't care for placeholders, so I don't allow them in any account for any reason.]

It isn't "offering"... I just get the placeholders. I might very well have wound up "accepting" once.

Is there a way to tell Quicken to "always trust the download"? There is no point in my *not* trusting what the FI gives me. The information that's available on their website is so crappy, there's no way I could verify accuracy anyway. This is an institution that, when I called asking for statements showing details of every transaction, actually said, "That would be far too complex to do." I tried to break the news to them that there was this fancy, new-fangled contraption called a "com-pu-tor" that would do stuff like that for them, but...

I would love to disallow them, too :-)

But since I do have these awful placeholders building up now... how can I get rid of them? I don't know what "cost" they're looking for. I need to click on something in Quicken to make Quicken happy and take the placeholders away.

All financial experts suggest that it is best to pay these fees from an account outside of the IRA and that would eliminate this problem.

Eric

My FI will about once a quarter issue a download that says I have zero shares in all my holdings. It is straightened out the next day. No I would not want to trust what the FI gives me. When I was automatically not thinking and accepting the FI download I found a lot of shares removed and shares added that I needed to clean up.

Delete them, just like you delete any other Quicken transaction.

Determine what the cause of the discrepancy is between your Quicken holdings and the downloaded holdings, and enter your own transaction(s) to correct the discrepancy.

[The "cost" (which you do not have to enter) is the same cost that any other shares of a security would have. If Quicken adds, or removes, shares in your account to correct, what it believes is a discrepancy; Quicken has no way of knowing what those shares cost. So Quicken gives you the "option" to tell it what they cost: you are not required to do that.]