tracking value and cash balance of investment accounts

ldamico7

What is the best way to track investment value and cash balances in order for the lifetime planner and reports to work correctly. I do not want to track individual transactions of shares because it never works correctly

Jim_Harman

"very diversified, not index funds" is inconsistent.

I second @ps56k's Bogleheads recommendation, unless these are trust accounts or something and you don't have any control over how the money is invested.

Jim_Harman

It depends on what you mean by "correctly". If you want Quicken to track and report on your investment performance, capital gains, and other taxes, you will have to enter all the transactions. If you just want to track account balances and have a rough idea of your performance, you can add or remove shares and cash at the end of each period to match your statements. 

I would avoid allowing Quicken to create Placeholders to adjust your share balances after downloading.

ldamico7

Thank you for your response. The three accounts have at least 100 mutual funds across them, and since the accounts are managed, there is a lot of activity that I do not want to baby sit. Placeholders are extensive (1 for 1 account, 14 for 1 account, but 142 for another)! All this from setting up and downloading the three accounts. Setting them up as assets and adjusting the value works okay but not for the Lifetime planner.
Any other thoughts?

NotACPA

May I ask WHY you have 100 funds in a single account?  Are you tracking this for some sort of business ... because my managed accounts have 6 funds TOTAL.

I'd think that must have a WHOLE LOT of funds that nearly duplicate each other ... and that with so many funds you might actually be better off with a simple S&P Index fund.

ldamico7

I don't designate the investments only the risk tolerance. these are fully managed accounts and very diversified, not index funds. A simple download of the value would be all I want. No simple process.

NotACPA

Sorry, but there's no way to download the "value" without downloading the holdings and their quotes.

I suggest that you follow Jim Harman's recommendation.

Jim_Harman

If you want to keep things even simpler and really don't care about the details of what is going on with your investments, you could define a single fake security with a constant share price of 1.00 and add and remove shares of that to match your account balances. Your Net Worth and Account Balances reports should reflect the balances. Are you adding to or receiving distributions from these accounts?

Ps56k2

ldamico7 said:

The three accounts have at least 100 mutual funds across them, and since the accounts are managed, there is a lot of activity that I do not want to baby sit.

Wow - sounds like a nice commission for someone that has your account.

You really should think about this portfolio, and in whose best interest it is being "managed"...  Portfolio churn and associated AUM fees, trading fees, loads, etc do not usually create wealth...  vs the overall market in the long term -

I would suggest some other places for financial guidance,

like... https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/index.php

Tom Young

"I do not want to track individual transactions of shares because it never works correctly."

Why not?  Does the Financial Institution (FI) handling the account do downloads into Quicken?  Done right, downloads should work though some FIs are better at this than others. 

Placeholders should never be automatically accepted into your Accounts if you want to maintain accurate records.  I've noticed with Schwab for example that not infrequently a ReinvDiv will suggest a placeholder for the same number of shares that were just bought; clearly the "balance" being downloaded omits the newly purchase shares.  Recognizing the problem, I simply dismiss the placeholder.  If I didn't do that I'm sure my Accounts would have hundreds of placeholders, too.

Jim_Harman

"very diversified, not index funds" is inconsistent.

I second @ps56k's Bogleheads recommendation, unless these are trust accounts or something and you don't have any control over how the money is invested.

ldamico7

True, I made an inconsistent statement.

ldamico7

I did not automatically accept placeholders, I set up three accounts and the download process pulled 3 years of transactions for each account. The only thing, I have done so far is indicate if the stock matched one already in my list, or if a new one should be added.

Jim_Harman

OK, skipping the investment advice for now, are these normal brokerage type accounts with someone else making the investment decisions, or are they more complex - trust accounts for example?

Are the securities stocks, ETFs, and mutual funds, or something more exotic? Are they publicly traded, so that Quicken can download quotes?

If they are normal brokerage accounts with publecly traded securities, it should not be too difficult to get the downloads to work properly and Quicken's balances to match your statements.

You need to decide whether the additional information you will get is worth the time it takes to get the data recorded correctly. If not, you may want to consider the suggestion above about defining your own $1.00 securities and just tracking the account balances.