Vanguard Conversion to IRA Brokerage Accts

denmarfl

Vanguard notified me that all Traditional IRA would be converted to IRA Brokerage Acct; no option not to convert.

My mistake, I trusted Vanguard to have thought this out so that when a Quicken user converted...the Traditional IRA Accts would simply get a new Broker Acct number....all holdings would just continue as if no acct chnage was made. My mistake.

To say the least I am very disappointed with VanGuard; just feel this conversion should have been better planned for Quicken users if nothing else but to alert us that the Traditional Acct will show Investments removed; and, new acct that will be Brokerage IRA accts will be created and Holdings information, which in my case was more than 10 years, would not be converted over to the new Brokerage Accts.

One of my accts; the old Traditional IRA Register has Cash showing (I have of course Deactivated all my Traditional registers); I can simply Withdrawn the cash to zero it out of the Register. The Traditional Register Mutual Funds (there are 6 investments; ..four the investments were removed ...but 2 show small Shares remain. I setup the Register with no breakdown of Mutual Investments so now I do not know how to remove the shares of the 2 Investments or zero out the 2 Investments. I have no way to Remove shares to indicate which Investment shares I want to remove shares from....

Looking at the Traditional accts at Vanguard; all the Prior Traditional accts show all Investments shares fully removed

How if even possible can I now remove the shares from the 2 Investments?

Bob_L

Don’t know why you wind up with cash in an account.  

Assuming that you have remove transactions in the old accounts and add transactions in the new, first DO A BACKUP.  Then delete the remove and add transactions followed by doing a transfer all shares from the old accounts to the new brokerage ones.  This will bring over the individual lots and cost basis (though probably not as important in the IRA.)  if you have many add transactions to delete a quicker way to do that is by a Banking, transactions report where you can multi select, right click delete.

HTH

Bob_L

BTW, please refresh my memory.  Do they create a new quicken account via the download or do they use one of the existing ones as the new account? 

denmarfl

The conversion had Vanguard removing all shares from the traditional register at the connection and it created new registers / account for the brokerage accounts. Thus, I was left with both the old traditional registers and the new brokerage registers. In one of my traditional registers, there are two out of my six Mutual Investments that's still show shares. I cannot select each individually so that I can remove the shares to show the register with zero balance insecurities

Bob_L

I have you tried what I suggested first?  When you delete a remove transaction the original shares will be there since it is a database. Then you can transfer them all using the transfer shares action.

denmarfl

Not sure I understood...as, I now have the Old Traditional Register and a New Broker register....all this done with a One Step Update. I had no control. Not sure how I can, if it is what you mean. The new Broker register created with shares so if I Transferred shares from the Old Traditional to the new Brokerage...the shares would end up as doubled.

But I did discover this. I was able to use REMOVE SHARES in the Old Traditional Register. When you enter the Mutual Funds Share Symbol, it only removes the shares for that specific Mutual Fund. The Old Traditional acct actually had of the 6 Mutual funds....One step whipped out all with the exception of leaving a small number of Shares in 2 Mutual Funds...strange, but that is what took Place. Again; I used the REMOVE shares for the 2 Funds...and now the Old Traditional Register after WITHDRAWING the CASH...is Zero.

Strange that all Vanguard Registers whipped out securities to zero but left a few dollars in cash...which I removed using WITHDRAW....

\Bottonline, I think all may be well. I Deactivated the old Traditional Registers...as from here on the New Brokerage registers will track the Investments.

Again; Vanguard should have done a better planning Job....and just configured the new Broker registers to link with the Traditional registers...but like I wrote, the One step went; remove shares from Traditional...and create New accts for the Broker...there was not a choice to Link.....

Bob_L

You said the new register was created with shares.  Were  they put there with an add transaction, one add for each security?

denmarfl

When One Step Update ran the day after the conversion took place....the New Broker accts that downloaded had...in the Holdings....the 6 Mutual funds...they were my correct shares and history on Each as I recall...back 18 months (not sure on the 18 mos; may have been less). I did not do anything to Remove shares from Traditional accts (done via One Step) and the Broker Accts created with the correct shares.....all done via One Step Update.

q_lurker

denmarfl said:

When One Step Update ran the day after the conversion took place....the New Broker accts that downloaded had...in the Holdings....the 6 Mutual funds...they were my correct shares and history on Each as I recall...back 18 months (not sure on the 18 mos; may have been less). I did not do anything to Remove shares from Traditional accts (done via One Step) and the Broker Accts created with the correct shares.....all done via One Step Update.

Relying solely on the FI (Vanguard) in these types of cases is, IMO, a kiss of death and foolish.  Again, my opinion, but the user needs to be proactive rather than becoming a passive victim.  Vanguard cannot reliably know how you have your accounts set up in your Quicken.  As you are seeing, Vanguard is (apparently) providing 18 months of actual transactions whereas your data could be years long or months long (if you took on some sort of personal archival process).  Eighteen months is a longer time span than most Fis would provide.  It may fit and satisfy some users, but it cannot possibly fit and satisfy all users.  

I would recommend to other readers of this discussion to ASK ahead of time about ways to handle this switch from MF account to a Brokerage Account.  Do not treat Quicken and the One-Step Update as a magical black box.  

denmarfl

As much as I appreciate your time to respond to the issue I presented for assistance, your reply is not helpful in that it did not provide any relevant steps needed to get the entries correct in my Quicken file. I still do not see myself as a passive victim; the conversion, users had NO choice. It was going to take place and there was no way anything could have been done to prevent the process to, ie; Traditional Accts closed, Brokerage acct opened. Had I called instead Vanguard they would not have had any recommendations, had I called Quicken; they would have been pretty much clueless (and by the way I did call Quicken and what I was hearing from my limited knowledge I know it wasn't correct. The only way to have avoided this would have been not to have Vanguard Transactions downloaded; deactivate the Traditional and not add the New Brokerage.

The main thing is, and I did it, make sure a Backup copy of your Quicken File is created before you proceed with the Conversion. I probably played with 2 or 3 Q files before I got it right...and I always had my backup Data file had I messed up.

Hopefully others reading this Post who have, or will have experienced this Conversion process will see how I manually corrected the issues, or believe I have, and their task will be easier than mine....

Thanks to all for the input

Tom Young

"I still do not see myself as a passive victim; the conversion, users had NO choice. It was going to take place and there was no way anything could have been done to prevent the process."

You weren't a passive victim in the sense that you could have somehow convinced Vanguard to not make the changes, but you were a passive victim in the sense that you let Vanguard do with your Quicken file whatever they wanted to do, be it right or wrong. And if you have "leftover" bits in the old Account(s) then you have been relying on "downloads" from Vanguard and not actively reconciling your Account(s) each month.

Quicken is a tool to help you do your accounting, it's not a tool that does your accounting for you, despite what Quicken marketing suggests.

Eventually you more or less figured it out.  

Knowing that Vanguard was going to consolidate all your holdings in a brokerage account the preemptive non-passive process would be to:

1. Create a manual brokerage Account to hold the mutual funds
2. In the Quicken Account(s) that held the mutual funds do a "Transfer Shares Between Accounts" action for each fund.  You'd see a Remove action for each fund, bring the fund balance in the "from" Account(s) to 0 and you'd see multiple Added actions for each fund in the "to" Account.  Each Added action would create a lot for each distinct purchase of the fund in the old Account and establish the lot with the correct holding period and basis.
3. Enable downloads in the "to" Account and do a One Step Update.  (Hopefully the the shares you transferred to the new Account matches Vanguard's records.  If they don't then you've got some research to do.)
4. Delete all the downloaded transactions entered into the "to" Account.  The complete and correct record of transactions is over there in the "from" Account(s).  (There are ways to delete records en masse without having to do them one at a time.)

There have been several posts in here about the action Vanguard is taking to consolidate mutual fund accounts into brokerage accounts and they come down to the same issue: you can't simply rely on downloads from financial institutions to do everything right when it comes to making entries in your Quicken file.

q_lurker

@denmarfl:  My reply was more directed to other readers than to you.  You had indicated you had gotten your issues resolved.  You said:  "\Bottonline, I think all may be well.", and went on to place the blame on Vanguard. "Again; Vanguard should have done a better planning Job".  Better planning up front on the part of the user is what I was recommending to others.

In addition to the comments from @Tom Young above, I would suggest you might have been able to simply deactivate online your one existing account in Quicken and then reactivate it linking it to the new brokerage based account.  You may have then been faced with deleting (or not accepting) the 18-months of downloaded transactions. 

But I similarly note another user recently undergoing the same type of conversion had started with multiple MF accounts getting consolidated into on brokerage account.  In that type of case, the simple (as I see it) deactivate/reactivate would not apply.  The optimum plan to approach this type of event is almost always case dependent.  I would never choose to let the FI dictate the approach through a One-step update.

Thanks @Tom Young for your accurate reply.