Q 05 Mutual Fund Sell and Purchase

"Zappa" wrote in news:WY3Xd.3733$ snipped-for-privacy@fe08.lga:

I don't know if this is the correct or accepted way of doing this (I'm still figuring it out myself). Both my wife and I participate in our employers' 401k/403b programs via paycheck deductions.

I recently decided to update our 401k/403b accounts with changes that have occured over the last several months. We had several funds that sold and bought other funds within the same plan.

I went to the Investing Center and chose the enter transactions button. I then did an adjustment to the share balance of the affected fund being sold and adjusted the shares to the number sold. I made this effective the day before the sale. (if I made it the same day, I ended up with a short sale somehow). I also adjusted the cash balance to 0 (since the payroll deduction shows as cash until I correct the plan to show updated fund share balances).

I then showed a buy of the new fund on the day of the purchase with the correct amount and let it figure the shares. (if I recall correctly)

I may be doing this all wrong, but it seems to have given me fairly accurate results.

I really am stumbling along in this area of Q and mainly post this for feedback on my method. I don't know what others do to keep up with these type accounts (401k/403b) vs stock purchases. I only have mutual funds at the present time but may play with individual stocks at some point in the near future. So I would really like to learn how to better utilize Q in this area.

Hope this helps rather than confuses... and thanks for any feedback.

It is just so wrong on so many levels. And you should really not have stuck it in the tail-end of another thread.

Hmm.. do you own funds-of funds accounts? Or are you selling funds to buy other funds? Your description is not clear.

There is a perfectly good and acceptable "Sell" transaction to record sales. Why on earth would you muck about with adjusting the share balance without showing the money flows? One of the most important reasons to track investments is to know how much money you put into an investment and how that money performs.

Now where did you get the money to "Buy" with if you did not do a "Sell"? And *never*, never, never (have I said it enough times?) let Quicken calculate the shares. You pay a certain amount of money and you get a certain number of shares. Enter these correctly and don;t let Quicken calculate it because Quicken will do decimal rounding that will leave you with incorrect share balances that are incredibly hard to fix. The actual share price is of relatively very little importance, so let quicken calculate that.

I can't for the life of me see how your results could be even remotely described as "accurate"

Good luck, you need it. Use the rule that R.C. White propounds. "Always follow the money" to make sure your transactions are correct.

"Mike B" wrote in news:422dd89e snipped-for-privacy@news1.prserv.net:

Not quite clear on what you're asking, Mike. Yep, I inadvertently left out the part after updating the share amounts and then doing the sell.

For some reason, there was a forced change in the investment options and we had to sell one fund and choose another to invest the proceeds.

Because I am just playing with this to figure out how to do it. I figure I can go back and delete the transactions involved and recreate the account to fix it once I figure out how this should be done.

I don't quite follow the concept of knowing exactly how much the funds cost anyway since a fixed percentage of the paycheck goes to the 401k plan which is then split multiple ways in the various investment vehicles the plan offers.

Thanks for the tips on correcting some of my more obvious errors.

So how do you keep your 401k/403b accounts up to date with fund expenses, employer contributions, dividends received, varying amounts going in each month (variable pay), etc. All I know to do is use the paper statements which come quarterly.. or go to the website of the investment company and see what transactions have occurred. Few if any of our investment options offer online transaction download.

To this point, I've been too ignorant/lazy to input all the affected transactions to keep it accurate and up-to-date, assuming I even knew how to do that. And now I'd like to do a better job.

And by accurate, I mean that my numbers are close to or equal to the numbers as shown on the various investment companies' websites.

I freely admit that the finagle factor has been judiously applied here. Hope you will agree that this is hardly intuitive, too.

Maybe everyone else who posts on this newsgroup knows exactly how to make Q work in this area. OTOH, maybe there are a bunch like me who don't have a clue how to do it. To those, I offer to be the village idiot so they can learn how to properly do these transactions (along with me).

Thanks.

The way you phrased your original problem statement was:

My question asked what funds do you have that sold other funds. If you are investing in a fund that in turn invests in other funds (aka fund of funds), then you do not have to track anything, your holdings in the original fund remains the same. If you sold one fund, or was forced to due to plan changes, then that is a different matter and much easier to understand.

You should track the *exact* number of shares and amount of money invested. If you let Quicken calculate either of these, there will be rounding errors and one day you'll be posting here 'cuz you are unable to sell all your shares in a particular fund. Let Quicken apply the rounding errors to the fund price.

Fund expenses (at least in my 401(k) is transparent. I don't see it, I don't track it. They skim it off the top somewhere.

I show cash flowing from a paycheck (deduction from pre-tax income) to the

401(k) account. Thereafter I download all the transactions. But I remember dimly that in the bad old days of manual transaction entry, I then entered "Buy" transactions for each fund that I invested in (The downloaded transactions do the same). Then quaterly (or with whatever frequency the funds declared dividends), I would do "ReInvest" transactions to accout for reinvested distributions from the various funds.

Should always be "Equal", never "close".

Perhaps it is my background, but I find most of these things fairly obvious. R.C. White has summed it up in his famous "R.C's Law" - "Follow the money". That is what Quicken is all about - money. If you mirror your transactions to the real-world transactions, most things are simple to do.

Don't be too hard on yourself, a willingness to learn and embrace new things is a "Good Thing"?

"Mike B" wrote in news:422e475b snipped-for-privacy@news1.prserv.net:

Gotcha.

What would be the advisibility to just wipe out my investment accounts and start them all over to get rid of all the extraneous junk that I've put in with my attempts to play? Will Q let me delete and recreate? If so, where's a good starting point? End of last quarter with # of shares and value at that point? Then begin inputting the data from there?

I notice that Valic says they won't download to Q05.. so I'm stuck with manually updating our Valic accounts. I have a Fidelity rollover IRA but think they will download. There are other funds with M&I and Ohio National that probably won't download. It's probably past time for me to clean up my investment activities. (that's high on my priority list)

I'll have to make a habit of regularly visiting the various companies' sites to get the data so it doesn't pile up.. else I'll probably let it go again.

Is there a better way to do this? It seems pretty manually intensive.

Erasing is a good option.

For Quicken to be accurate, you need to input *every* transaction you effected on your investments.

The date you input should probably be be determined individually for each account based on the historical data that is readily downloadable, but in any case nothing later than the beginning of this financial year.

Quicken will place a placeholder in each account at the designated date and at some point in time you should expect to do one of two things.

a) Provide the average cost of your holdings prior to the placeholder, or

b) Enter all transactions prior to the placeholder. Note that transactions prior to the placeholder will not update cash amounts. This is by design, as the account's cash balance was deemed correct at the time of the placeholder and older transactions will thus not mess with that cash balance. This gets a little tricky if you modify some transactions from other accounts to become transfers into an investment account, so probably best not to change historic transactions to show cash inflows into your investment accounts.

It is harder to get started than it is to keep things up-to-date.

"Mike B" wrote in news:4231d025 snipped-for-privacy@news1.prserv.net:

I think I can go back 18 months on most accounts. But if I have incomplete records beyond that, is there really any value/point going back further than the 1st of this year?

How true that is!