Using Quicken 2005 for my 401k account, I tried to enter a "Corporate Securities Spin-off" of Disney funds to Citadel Broadcasting and entered the date 6/12/2007 and it resulted in two transaction entries 1/12/2007 RtrnCap Disney 1/12/2007 Bought Citadel
With the dates incorrect for some reason I tried to edit the two transactions, but when I tried to correct the date it gives an error You must enter a date on or before 1/12/2007
Can I just manually create two transactions manually using the correct date or is there anything magical about using the "Spin-off" transaction window?
Gee... I found some "magic" that Quicken did when I used the "Corporate Securities Spin-off". For each of all my historical BUY transactions of Disney (going back to 1997), Quicken created a BUY transaction for Citadel.
Can I bypass all these transacti> Using Quicken 2005 for my 401k account, I tried to enter a
The Spinoff transaction is really a pseudo-transaction; it just generates one RtnCap/Bought pair for every lot of the spinning off company that you own.
I have no idea why Q2005 won't let you change the date of those generated transactions; I entered a test spinoff and had no problem modifying the date of the resulting, Quicken generated, transactions.
I suspect that 1/12/2007 is when you bought your Disney shares; the date Quicken generated isn't incorrect when you consider what is needed and how Quicken tries to provide it.
When the dust clears, you want to show that you "acquired" the shares of the new company on the same date(s) you "acquired" the shares of the old company: a RtnCap/Buy, dated the same as the date of each lot of the old company, does that, but it's a bit misleading since it makes it look like you owned the new company before the new company existed.
If you just change the transaction dates of the RtnCap/Bought transactions, you will not have the correct "acquisition" date(s) for the shares of the new company.
You can take a slightly different approach than Quicken does; you can use a RtnCap/Shares-Added pair for each lot of the old company. You can date those transactions on the date of the spinoff, but put the date of the purchase of the old company shares in the Shares Added "Date Acquired" field (and the cost of the old lot in the "Total Cost" field). [If you Edit the Bought transaction to be a Shares Added transaction, you should only have to change the two dates (Transaction and Acquired).]
You'll also have to handle the RtnCap differently since, by default, it wants to add cash to your account, and if you don't use a "Buy" transaction to "acquire" the shares of the new company, that RtnCap cash will just sit in your account. So you change the RtnCap transactions to have the name of the investment account where the transaction is recorded, in the "Transfer account" field.
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