transferring an IRA to different brokerage firm

Grandma B

I transferred (rolled over?) funds from a traditional IRA I inherited to a different brokerage firm. I use the update transaction feature (download) with both brokerages but quicken entered the transaction as a withdrawal once - and another time (different broker) as 'sold shares'. As said I download transactions online so assume (hope!) that it's done correctly. .. Also when one IRA was completely moved to the new brokerage there was a remaining cash balance?? How to clear that out? ---

Also I have no idea how/why quicken decides/enters the cost it does. it does not match up with my brokerage's statements.... When I take out the RMD that's another issue too - how does quicken come up with the cost? The initial IRA were inherited from my dad.

When I set up for downloading my new brokerages IRA I noticed it did so as a 'brokerage' account and not an IRA... would that make a difference - and how to correct it? That was from TD Ameritrade Institutional division.

I like things to balance correctly but am unsure how to adjust or correct or -?- without messing things up.

Thanks!

Grandma B

Also I've looked and can't find how to make a report that includes IRA amounts. Surely there is a way to show those investments too.... Help please.

Jim_Harman

You have several questions here, let's work on them one at a time.

Unfortunately you can't depend on the accuracy of downloaded transactions when rolling over IRAs.

What happened in real life with these accounts? If you look at the statements (not the downloaded transactions), were the original investments moved directly ("in kind") to the new account, or were the securities in the old account sold (converted to cash), the cash moved to the new account, and then perhaps different securities purchased in the new account? 

Grandma B

Thanks for getting back to me. The first move when I received the inherited IRA's were in kind -- same brokerage and same one fund. This is where I'm having problems with costs in Quicken, etc. Then when I moved them to the brokerage were I had other investments is was still set up as inherited IRA but converted to cash and then new securities/funds were bought. The final move was to the brokerage where my financial advisor moved to and that was a direct move - same securities/funds. I do have details from the last two brokerages as to cost for each security/fund but not for the initial transfer from my relative and when I had the IRA in that first brokerage. I have statements from them (the first brokerage) that show cost each month for the one fund but doesn't match quicken and no idea how it got the amount especially after taking the RMDs...
Thanks for your help.

q_lurker

@Grandma B:  I'll tell you what I did similarly as best I recall.

Taking on an Inherited IRA -- What I recall happened was that the original old-brokerage had to create an Inherited IRA account and do an internal transfer from the deceased's IRA to this new Inherited IRA account.  Those assets (securities) were then liquidated and the cash transferred from that old-brokerage account to an Inherited IRA account created at my preferred financial institution.  Once the cash came over, I bought my preferred securities.  That old-brokerage Inherited IRA account only existed for a few days.      

In Quicken, I treated this as one account (Inherited IRA).  In that account, I manually created each original holding reflecting the securities involved, their original acquisition dates and cost basis as reported by that original old-brokerage. 

• Shares Added on mm/dd/yyyy SecurityX  YY-shares acquired xx/yy/zzzz for $Y

I also deposited some 'cash' that had accrued in the deceased's IRA account

Next day, I sold all those shares converting the entire holding to cash.

For some reason (to reflect the real world I suppose), I recorded Withdrawal and Deposit amounts as Cash transactions showing the move from old-brokerage to preferred-brokerage.  

Only then did I connect the newly created Quicken Inherited IRA to the financial institution for downloading.  That brought in the Deposit transaction (matching the one I had entered) and all the buys I had made in that new account.  All those new Buys creates new (and accurate) cost basis information for each holding.

[Note that since this is an IRA account, the cost basis information is not really relevant for any tax purposes.  The cost basis of those shares that were transferred went away as soon as you sold and bought new holdings.]

Your 'final' move -- For that situation, if at all possible, I prefer to disable the online connection to the prior brokerage for that Quicken account, and then re-establish the connection of that account to the new brokerage.  That keeps you having just one Inherited IRA account in Quicken. 

Option B for that final move is to use the Shares Transferred function to move shares from prior-brokerage Inherited IRA account in Quicken to new-brokerage Inherited IRA account in Quicken.  If going with that two Quicken accounts setup, I suggest not relying on the financial institution downloads to transfer all the lot and basis details into the newer Quicken account.  The Shares Transferred function performas that task better. 

HTH