Quicken 2008 Annuity

Your comment seems self-contraditory.

In all likelihood, your "annuity" is not a publicly traded security; so you have two possibilities: if your fianancial institution downloads to Quicken, you should be able to get transactions and prices from their downloads.

Otherwise, you will have to enter the transactions and prices manually.

I will try to clarify my post.

The variable annuity I purchased is not traded on a board with a stock symbol. The annuity is a basket of many stocks and bonds. Therefore to get its current value I can log on to my brokerage account and get a current value and then post that manually into Q08.

Now my first questi>> How do I find out how to record the purchase of a variable annuity? >

There is no prescribed way to handle this. To me it depends a lot on what information your financial institution gives you.

If all they give you is current value, I suspect you can create a dummy security in Quicken, with mm fund characteristics, and track your annuity that way; where increases in value can be reinvested interest (or reinvested dividends).

I have an after-tax annuity account where the fi treats the holdings more-or-less as securities, though they aren't publicly traded either. One of my "securties" there most closely resembles a mm fund (the fi gives me only the current value), so I track it like a mm fund. The other security I hold in the account more closely resembles an index mutual fund (the fi gives me "unit prices" and "units held" and tries to match a known index), so I track it like an index mutual fund.

As I understand it, insurance companies sometimes use "accumulation units" as way of representing a contract owner's share of the underlying pool of securities to which the variable annuity is tied. If that's the case here then I'd suggest creating an investment account, creating a new security named along the lines of "Variable Annuity with (Insurance company)" and then transferring the $100,000 into this new account. Use the $100,000 to buy however many accumulation units the insurance company says you got with your $100,000; the price per unit you'd use is $100,000/(# of units). As you get subsequent statements from the insurance company enter a new "quote" for the accumulation units as of the statement date using (value as of statement date)/(# of units).

If the insurance company doesn't use some sort of "unit" in their statements to you then, yes, you make up the number of "shares" you own at a "cost per share" such that "shares" x "cost per share" = $100,000. If you're 1,000% sure that you'll never, ever need to change the number of "shares" in the account then 1 share @ $100,000 would be OK. I'd probably opt for 10,000 shares @ $10 per share just for a little more flexibility down the line, i.e., less chance of having to deal with very small fractions of a share. As the statements come in (or you log into the account online) you'd simply recalculate the "quote" for the number a shares you own and plug that into Quicken.

Tom Young

Thank you all, I will try your suggestions.

If the insurance company doesn't use some sort of "unit" in their statements to you then, yes, you make up the number of "shares" you own at a "cost per share" such that "shares" x "cost per share" $100,000. If you're 1,000% sure that you'll never, ever need to change the number of "shares" in the account then 1 share @ $100,000 would be OK. I'd probably opt for 10,000 shares @ $10 per share just for a little more flexibility down the line, i.e., less chance of having to deal with very small fractions of a share. As the statements come in (or you log into the account online) you'd simply recalculate the "quote" for the number a shares you own and plug that into Quicken.

Tom Young