Oregon College 529 Issues

Eric Vasbinder

In several instances, there are investments available that are "portfolio" style mutual funds that include multiple mutual funds in one fund portfolio: a multi-fund, or a fund of funds.  A prime example of this is the Oregon College Savings program, a 529 college savings program that uses a number of multi-fund options with high performance.  E.g. https://www.oregoncollegesavings.com/research/multi-fund.shtml#underlying-diversified-us

I would like to be able to track the individual funds within the main fund for performance, cost basis, etc. as well as the main fund itself.  The main fund does not have a ticket or CUSIP, but the underlying funds do.

Is there a way in Quicken 2018 Windows to set up a fund of funds as a holding in an investment account?

Thank you for your help!

Tom Young

Well, there's no problem at all with setting up an Account in Quicken that has a bunch of different mutual funds in it, but it would be extremely difficult - probably impossible - to make that Account mimic what happens in the actual 529 program you're invested in.  Since you don't really have individual, actual, investments in all these mutual funds you're not going to get automatic updates of distributions from the funds, and it may not be apparent exactly the percentage each fund makes up in the 529 plan's portfolio and what happens when the 529 plan shifts those percentages.

If you just want to see the performance of each mutual fund in the 529 plan it might be better to rely on external sources - Morningstar, Yahoo Finance, whatever - to assess that. 

Quicken is, more than anything else, an accounting program to track you own personal finances, (or some other "entity" that you define), so if you're not really "invested" in the group of mutual funds, in exactly the correct percentages, I question trying to use Quicken in this fashion.