Rollover, Trad IRA to Trad IRA

"JohnSmith" wrote

I just rolled over a Federated Traditional IRA to Fidelity.

I was successful creating a new Investment Acct within Quicken and downloading the new account information. Great!

Now, what's the proper method to "close" the original (Federated) account within Quicken? Just delete it? Withdrawl and Transfer (WithdrwX)

Since this is within an IRA, I don't think I care about the actual past transactions - they are all tax free (for now, of course)

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I can't think of any good reason to delete the old account.

Retaining the old account will allow you to research activity in that account. But, perhaps more importantly, it will allow you to see views of your historical net worth. If you simply delete the account, it will look as if your net worth spiked this year by the amount of the value of the account.

If you don't want to see the account most of the time, "Hide" it. You can still select it for virtually all reports/displays when it is meaningful for you.

As to the specifics of the rollover in Quicken, that depends on how the rollover occurred in the real-world.

The basic distinction I see is whether you transferred the assets, or you sold the assets and transferred only cash.

For the former, you would basically use the Quicken "Shares transferred between accounts" transaction; accompanied by the "Cash transferred from account" transaction, if there was any cash to transfer.

For the latter, you would sell the holdings in the old account, transfer the cash to the new account, then purchase securities in the new account as needed.

To some extent, your download to the new account should reflect its "half" of the process. If the real-world old account is closed, you may not get downloads from it, so it will be made right by just your manual entries. If you did get downloads for the closing of the old account, you'll need to manage them to agree with Quicken's ability to record the activity ... which the financial institution's often can't duplicate exactly.

In general, it's better to have the manual activity recorded in Quicken before downloading. Then you can either "match" downloaded transactions to your manual entries, or delete the downloaded transactions, if they can't be made to agree with your manual entries.

John Pollard said

Thanks John, as usual your response was comprehensive and informative.

Your efforts here are appreciated.

Best regards,