Recently I opened a Roth IRA at Vanguard, which auto-downloads into Quicken. I purchased an index fund (VTSMX). In addition to a $10 custodial fee, Vanguard charges a $2.50 quarterly fee for index fund balances less than $10K. Well, on 6/24, the fund issued a dividend, which is automatically reinvested, and at the same time, they charged me the $2.50 fee. Here's the strange behavior:
Two transacations were recorded as follows:
- ReinvDiv, total dividend was .29, yet it recorded the total dividend but *net* shares (i.e., shares calculated on .29-.50=.79), so the transaction calculated an artificially inflated share price.
- MiscIncX, -.50, commenting that it's an account maintenance fee.
I thought this was rather strange, so I called Vanguard thinking it was a Vanguard reporting issue. They said they had gotten "a couple" other complaints about this, so they were looking into it and hoped to have it corrected by the next quarterly dividend/fee time in December.
So I figured I'd manually "fix" these two strange transactions. I deleted the two downloaded transactions and created a new ReinvDiv transaction entering the $6.29 dividend, shares calculated on the full $6.29 (not the net $3.79 as in the downloaded transaction), and $2.50 under Commission, with a comment noting that the $2.50 was an account maintenance fee. Before I clicked Enter/Done, the correct share price was reflected. But here's the strange part -- when I clicked Enter/Done, two transactions were entered, exactly like the two I downloaded from Vanguard! (See above) Clearly, the error is due to Quicken's interpretation of the data, and not how Vanguard reports it. (The transaction is correctly reflected in my account data on Vanguard's web site.)
Now, my only other investment account is a Fidelity 403b, and I've had it for so long that there are no fees associated with it. My question is, am I nuts, or is this an incorrect way to represent the activity on this IRA account?
Incidentally, I also paid a $10 custodial fee when I opened the account. When I run an "investment performance" report, Quicken reports the $10 custodial fee and the $2.50 acct maintenance fee as positive amounts in the "Returns" field. Am I missing something here?
Confused and dazed, ;-)
Margaret