Vanguard Account Shares Transferred to Admiral Class?

I used stock split to do my conversions to Admiral shares. Some people prefer corporate acquisition. Search "Admiral Shares" on this group for exact procedures.

Need explanation, please, on why just "Remove" Investor shares and then "Add" Admiral shares wouldn't work. That's how the transactions came downloaded from Vanguard. Thanks.

Does that preserve the cost basis? I haven't run a test, but I doubt it.

And that's what the Quicken Corporate Acquisition uses. One Remove shares transaction for all shares of the "acquired" company; one Add shares transaction for each *lot* of the acquired company. Per account where the "acquiring" company is held.

But if one had to do that manually, it could be a tedious exercise.

And when you didn't acquire all your shares from the fi that now holds those shares ... that fi can't download the correct Add Shares transactions (unless you made the effort to tell them about each lot you ever bought, including via reinvestments).

A possible drawback to using Corporate Acquisition for a conversion is that, the Corporate Acquisition "acquires" *all* shares in all accounts; while sometimes a conversion only affects some of the shares owned. Even then, it may sometimes be easier to delete unwanted Add Shares transactions and modify incorrect Remove shares transactions, than to manually enter the correct transactions.

It does if you make sure you have one Add Shares transaction for each lot purchased of the "acquired" company ... with the correct cost of the original purchase in the Add Shares transaction.

Vanguard downloads one remove shares for all prior transactions and one add shares per account. To preserve cost basis per transaction I prefer the stock split. I've done this at least four times now. You input prior share number, current share number and price. If you have it in two accounts which are both being converted, like I did; chose one to get the share numbers. It will convert both using the same ratio. Then go to stock description and change the symbol to the Admiral Share symbol. When it asks about price history, chose default. You may be left with a rounding error. Mine was off .000015 in shares. I just Added Shares in that quantity at $0 so it matched the new number. Prior lots will be to six decimal places instead of three. I've learned to live with that.

The problem John is Vanguard doesn't download it that way, which was the original question. Accepting the Vanguard download just gets you a total shares in and a total out. No cost association.

Vanguard downloads one remove shares for all prior transactions and one add shares per account. To preserve cost basis per transaction I prefer the stock split. I've done this at least four times now. You input prior share number, current share number and price. If you have it in two accounts which are both being converted, like I did; chose one to get the share numbers. It will convert both using the same ratio. It converts the history like that also. Then go to stock description and change the symbol to the Admiral Share symbol. When it asks about price history, chose default. You may be left with a rounding error. Mine was off .000015 in shares. I just Added Shares in that quantity at $0 so it matched the new number. Prior lots will be to six decimal places instead of three. I've learned to live with that.

The question (by Andrew) that I answered was whether the Remove shares and Add Shares retained the cost basis. As my *qualified* response said: it does (when the Add Shares transactions contain the correct cost). The question I answered didn't specifically ask if Vanguard downloaded correct transactions and I did not attempt to address what Vanguard downloaded; just the notion of whether Remove Shares/Add Shares could handle the transaction. I made the requirement clear.

And I think I've said here before, that it's not likely that you can expect investment fi's to consistently download transactions as you would like them. Sometimes they can't. And sometimes they download them as they should, from their perspective ... even if that isn't how the user ultimately wants them recorded in Quicken.

I've learned to check what the fi downloads and adjust accordingly ... including deleting downloaded transactions when there is no way to make use of them. [If a Corporate Acquisition transaction had been done before the download, the downloaded transactions should have "matched" the Quicken generated transactions, and could have been Accepted with causing any problem.]

FWIW, Vanguard's ADD SHARES and REMOVE SHARES did NOT retain cost basis (as I expected would happen) when downloaded from Vanguard. The incoming transaction has the net value of the outgoing transaction, and thus, no cost basis was made. In fact, it is funny in that the ADD SHARES was processed BEFORE the REMOVE SHARES when I did a ACCEPT ALL. I wonder if it would have been reversed if I selected did the REMOVE SHARES first? No matter, the correct value is still there when all is said and done.

I am not so sure personally I care. Any cost basis I ultimately report to the IRS will be coming off of the Vanguard 1099B when I sell. In fact, I think I remember reading recently that soon FIs are going to be required to report cost basis to the IRS as well as just the proceeds as they do today.