Transition Vanguard accounts to Brokerage Accounts

myramoki

Recently I made the decision to transition my Vanguard non-Brokerage accounts to the new Brokerage account types. This came with a number of issues for my Quicken setup, but I managed to find my way around all of them. As I didn't see a complete answer elsewhere, I'm posting my experience.

To begin with, I had in Vanguard:

1. Investment mutual funds
2. Brokerage account
3. Rollover IRA
4. Traditional IRA
5. ROTH IRA

My funds in #1 would end up being merged into my existing Brokerage account (#2), while the various IRA funds would all create new IRA Brokerage accounts.

First off: Backup Quicken! I went through this process twice, as the first time I got a little confused on some things, so i started over.

Second: The easiest way to deal with accounts that are completely new, like how my Rollover IRA became a new Rollover IRA Brokerage is to:
1. Edit the existing account
2. Change the account number to the new account number
3. After downloading new transactions, delete the 'Added shares...' entries.
This will keep all of your history intact and involves the minimum work.

Third: The merging of my Investment funds into my existing Brokerage account was a little different. First off, since I had an existing Brokerage account, what Vanguard is doing behind the scenes is just merging your investment funds with this. On the website, they will list this account with a new number. But this is the tricky part, if you try to do a traditional adding of accounts in Quicken, Vanguard still is using the OLD Brokerage account.

So what I did was this:
1. Deactivated my Brokerage account (I have a lot more information in my regular investment account, but you could flip this process)
2. Edit my investment account, changing the account number to the one from my old brokerage account.
3. Go to the Brokerage account and right click on a transaction and select Move Transactions...
4. Select all transactions from my brokerage account and move them to my Investment account
5. After downloading new transactions, delete the 'Added shares...' entries.
And were are good.

If you didn't have a brokerage account and you upgraded regular investment funds to a new Brokerage type account, then I believe that the new number that you see on Vanguards website would be your ACTUAL account number.

Its a bit annoying that Vanguard is using the old Brokerage account number for downloads, but having worked at a financial institution, I'm well aware that they often have accounts numbers that they present to the user and use entirely different real account number behind the scene

q_lurker

Thanks for the helpful summary.  I think you've done things as effectively as possible.  

My personal bias on the Third point would be to use a Shares Transferred between accounts rather than the Move Transactions approach.  Either should work and both should yield similar results.  I am just sort of 'old-school' and am more familiar with the Share Transferred than the Move Transactions.      

K.

I did this differently, because the shares transferred approach would not show my history and cost basis in the new account. I guess there's always more than one way to get there:

Add a new account in Quicken, entering Vanguard as the institution. Use your regular username and password.

Quicken will show both of your accounts – your original (make sure it’s linked to your original Quicken account) and a new one called “Brokerage”. Rename the new account to Vanguard Brokerage (date of transition)

In the original account, highlight one transaction and then click “Select All” from the Edit menu.

Drag all your transactions from the original account into the new brokerage account.

Delete the newly downloaded “Remove shares” and “Add shares” transactions between the original and new accounts.

The new Brokerage account balances should match your online balances, and your transaction history and cost basis should be correct.

There may still be a balance in your original account because of Quicken’s somewhat mysterious creation of “placeholder transactions”. You can just create a payment/deposit transaction to zero this out. Date it far in the past so it won’t create any confusion for your current day to day records.