Retirement Savings Value INCORRECT and can't be edited

Martha Booz

My net worth is supposedly in the hundreds of thousands, because the information in my Quicken retirement account is incorrect. It says I own stocks that I do not own, and have not owned for years and years, and that I have received dividends and income I have not received. My retirement account is really in the 70K's. How can I get this fixed?

jacobs

@Martha Booz  No one here can see the specifics of your data, so I can only offer general suggestions.

Do you have your retirement account connected to download transactions from your brokerage? When you look at the transactions in this account, do you see transactions reporting the dividends and income you're saying shouldn't be there? I guess I'm confused about how such detail transactions could be in your Quicken account if you stay you never received them. They ether had to be downloaded or you had to have entered them manually. 

Typically, if there's a security or two which Quicken shows from your past but you're certain you no longer hold, the way to resolve it is a Remove Shares transaction, back-dated to some prior year, to subtract whatever shares Quicken is saying you hold of that security. In short: adjust your holdings in Quicken to match what they are in the real world. But since you say there are dividend and income transactions which aren't real, some additional exploration or explanation is necessary. 

Martha Booz

Thank you for your help! I haven't downloaded any transactions into Quicken for years. Would Quicken download automatically? I've changed institutions and my IRA has entirely different securities in it now. My current financial advisor has me in some bonds and mostly in Vanguard. The value just now is $71,xxx.xx. Would the actual security names be helpful? Doing a Remove Shares for the wrong securities would take a lot of time! All of them are incorrect, basically.

jacobs

@Martha Booz  Transactions don't magically appear in your Quicken file. If you didn't enter them yourself, then you must have -- now or in the past -- connected these accounts to your brokerage to download.

You first need need to go to Settings for your account to see if it is set up to download transactions. Click on the account in the left sidebar -- is there just one account, or more than one? -- and then click on Settings on the bottom right toolbar. Click on the Downloads tab. Does it look like this:



This is an account that is not configured to download from the financial institution. If it shows other information, then you're set up to download transactions; you'll probably want to click to Disconnect for the time being until you can get things squared away.

Another question: what are the most recent transactions for dividends or income which appear in your transaction register which you believe don't belong there?

My guess -- and it's purely a guess based on not having enough information -- is that you were connected to your former financial institution for downloads, and you never dealt with the transfer to a new broker and the changes in all your securities.

You have two paths forward. The blunt one is to just delete your old retirement account and all its history from Quicken. Then, create a new retirement account and manually enter the share balances of each security as of December 31, 2020. Then you can manually enter any transactions going forward, or you can possibly connect the account to your financial institution (if they participate with Quicken) to have transactions downloaded automatically. You'll need to rely on your broker to show your gains/losses on your investments, since Quicken won't have the proper cost basis going back in time, but this is the fastest way to get Quicken up-to-date with your actual investments and track things going forward.

The other approach would be to work through your holdings, removing shares of securities you sold a long time ago and adding shares of securities you now hold. It would be best to enter every transaction since you switched to your current broker, but I don't know how long ago that was and how many transactions that would require -- it might be an unmanageable amount. The advantage of entering everything is so Quicken can show your gains/losses on each security. But if that's not feasible, then you can use Add Shares to simply populate you account with your current holdings (or, I'd recommend, you holdings as of your December 31 statement).

The point is that your account didn't get this far out of sync with the real world overnight, so you're going to have to spend some time to get rid of the out-of-date data and input the current data. 

Martha Booz

Jacobs! I AM SO GRATEFUL!!! Thank you for being so explicit and direct and specific. I will work on it and figure out what's going on. I really appreciate your advice!

Martha Booz

I decided that I didn't care if Quicken tracks my retirement account, so I may delete the whole account or just ignore it. The main thing I use Quicken for is to track my checking account. My financial advisor sends me statements regularly and they make sense to me so I'm good for the retirement account.

I surely do appreciate your giving so much thought and time to my questions! I should have been able to figure out how to delete that retirement account on my own, so I'm particularly grateful for your advice!