Need a Quick and Dirty Way to Close Mutual Fund Investment Accounts

BillyB

I own a handful of mutual fund IRA accounts held nearly four years by a certain broker. Each account contains numerous securities. I've been downloading and importing all transactions into Quicken since day one. I never managed the composition of these funds. All I ever really wanted was to track total market value over time by account.  Security level visibility was therefore more detail than I needed. I never took the time to identify all those securities for Quicken. If Quicken didn't recognize a security, I identified it as new whether or not it was. Consequently, the detail is a mess but Quicken seemed to provide the total market value I was looking for.

I recently closed all my accounts with this first brokerage and transferred all my assets to a different brokerage. Most positions were transferred "in-kind" but some were cashed out first. My new plan is to track a single total market value for all the accounts in the brokerage manually and use the broker's system to analyze detail when I wish to.

I figured the easiest way to model this would be to open a brokerage account representing the second broker with a beginning balance of a single figure for the total incoming transfer and close the accounts with all the detail with the originating first broker. The trouble is all these accounts are full of lots of securities and Quicken won't "close" an account that has securities in it.

Can you suggest the quickest way for me to close these accounts at the first broker while retaining the historical total market values for each account for reporting purposes without needing to manual remove hundreds of security positions within these accounts? Alternatively, can you suggest a better way to accomplish my objective? Total account market values is all I need.

Sherlock

I suggest you transfer all of the holdings to a new temporary brokerage account (open each account, select Enter transactions and Shares Transferred Between Accounts from the Enter transaction: pull-down menu, and choose All securities) and then use a customized Transaction report to delete all of the Added transactions from the new brokerage account (select Reports > Banking > Transaction, press Alt + C, select the Accounts tab, Clear All, check the new brokerage account, select OK, select all of the transactions by left-clicking the first transaction and  Shift  + left-clicking the last transaction, and select Edit > Delete transaction(s)).

Bob_L

I do not like the “I just want to track market values approach”, though I have seen others who find it works for them.  So here’s a try at it.

One approach, but wait for other ideas as well, could be to transfer all shares to the new brokerage account.  You will wind up with hundreds of “add shares” transactions in the new account as well as one removed shares transaction for each security in the old accounts.  This will give you a permanent record of the number of shares of each transferred security via the removed shares entry.  The old accounts should now be able to be closed, though if there was any cash left I would transfer that to the new account before closing.

The new account could conceivably work at this point for you, though you may not like it because of all of the add shares transactions.  To get rid of those, run a banking transactions report, multi select all of them, right click delete.  Now enter one add shares transaction for each security in the new account.  Get the share number from the new broker, though it should match the remove shares number from the old accounts.  Now to update market values download quotes for each security or manually enter on the portfolio view.

Please BACKUP FIRST, and wait to see if others have a simpler way of handling your request, or can point out problems this might produce.

(looks like @sherlock has recommended the same approach while I was typing).

BillyB

What do you think of this approach?

1) Create a new brokerage account with an opening balance equal to the sum total of the beginning market value of the sum of all accounts held at the original brokerage on day 1. Create a fictitious security, say at $1.00/share and buy a number of shares equal to the cash balance.

2) Run an account balances report for the first brokerage accounts to show market values and sums for each account across the date range the accounts are active.

3) Adjust the $1.00 price on the fictitious security created in step 1 above to make the value equal to the sum of the market values shown in the report in step #2 above across the various reporting dates in the date interval.

4) Mark the actual accounts held at the first brokerage as "separate" in the display options for those accounts. Alternatively, I could delete them.

Pros:
Simpler/Easier/Quicker. Don't have to deal with transferring and removing all those securities.
Transaction detail is excluded from my use of the system but available should I ever wish to reference it, which is doubtful.

Cons: I actually haven't cleaned up the mess, just separated it out from what I use of the system.

BillyB

> @Bob_L said:
> I do not like the “I just want to track market values approach”,

Bob, I assume you don't like it because it doesn't allow you to use the investment management tools Quicken provides. The primary usefulness of these tools seems to me to be for the active investor creating and managing their portfolio across more than one brokerage, especially where those brokerages don't offer similar or better account management software tools. Downside is that it still requires a lot of effort to reconcile Quicken with the detail of the underlying accounts. Please correct me if my assumption is off base.

In my situation, I have consolidated most of my investment into a single brokerage that offers good reporting and analysis. I'm also using one of their financial planners/managers. I participate in strategic portfolio decisions but am only passive when it comes to specific securities. I'm not sure what value I gain by reproducing all the reporting produced by the brokerage on my own device in Quicken and whether it's worth the effort. Your thoughts?

Sherlock

BillyB said:

What do you think of this approach?

1) Create a new brokerage account with an opening balance equal to the sum total of the beginning market value of the sum of all accounts held at the original brokerage on day 1. Create a fictitious security, say at $1.00/share and buy a number of shares equal to the cash balance.

2) Run an account balances report for the first brokerage accounts to show market values and sums for each account across the date range the accounts are active.

3) Adjust the $1.00 price on the fictitious security created in step 1 above to make the value equal to the sum of the market values shown in the report in step #2 above across the various reporting dates in the date interval.

4) Mark the actual accounts held at the first brokerage as "separate" in the display options for those accounts. Alternatively, I could delete them.

Pros:
Simpler/Easier/Quicker. Don't have to deal with transferring and removing all those securities.
Transaction detail is excluded from my use of the system but available should I ever wish to reference it, which is doubtful.

Cons: I actually haven't cleaned up the mess, just separated it out from what I use of the system.

Item #4 is the issue you asked us to help resolve.  While you may mark the accounts as separate, they will have holdings that keep them from being deleted and may distort any reports that include them.  We provided a solution that makes it simple to remove those holdings.

Regarding the approach you're using to represent the new IRA account, I suggest adjusting the number of shares of the fictitious security - not its price.  Essentially, you'd be treating it as though it was a money market fund.

Bob_L

Couple of observations about your plan:
The option of alternatively deleting the accounts is never a good idea since they interrelate with your other accounts and are a record of,what happened, even if it may be “messed up”.

One fake security is a way, but it means you must manually update its value.  Having individual real world securities makes market value automatic, i.e. via downloading of quotes.

Doing the transfers, etc. for all of those securities isn’t as difficult to do as it may appear.  Give it a try...you can always revert to the backup or continue from that point to what you suggested for the final account by deleting the add shares transactions.

Bob_L

BillyB said:

> @Bob_L said:
> I do not like the “I just want to track market values approach”,

Bob, I assume you don't like it because it doesn't allow you to use the investment management tools Quicken provides. The primary usefulness of these tools seems to me to be for the active investor creating and managing their portfolio across more than one brokerage, especially where those brokerages don't offer similar or better account management software tools. Downside is that it still requires a lot of effort to reconcile Quicken with the detail of the underlying accounts. Please correct me if my assumption is off base.

In my situation, I have consolidated most of my investment into a single brokerage that offers good reporting and analysis. I'm also using one of their financial planners/managers. I participate in strategic portfolio decisions but am only passive when it comes to specific securities. I'm not sure what value I gain by reproducing all the reporting produced by the brokerage on my own device in Quicken and whether it's worth the effort. Your thoughts?

Yes that is pretty much correct, though the “lot of effort” is in the eyes of the beholder.

Jim_Harman

For me, there are a couple of advantages of tracking the details of my security holdings and transactions. These may or may be important to you. 

One is getting an updated overall picture of my asset allocation. This helps me decide when to rebalance .

Another is tax lot tracking, especially for "uncovered" lots purchased a long time ago.

BillyB

Thanks all for your ideas guys! Appreciate it.