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Creating report for different 401K contributions

Pong Ching

I use paycheck wizard to setup my before tax, Roth, and after tax 401K contributions. All these contributions goes to the same account. What I noticed is that the different contribution types are only entered as memo rather than category. As a result, I'm not able to create a report that can do subtotal on different types of contributions. For example, I want to find out the total amount for each of type of the contributions, pre-tax, and Roth and After-tax. Based on the current setup, there is no way you can do that. How to solve this issue?

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Scooterlam

I understand that you use just one account to collect contributions to these different investment types.

I would break the investment types (401k, Roth, After-tax) into separate accounts and adjust your paycheck wizard categories (pre-tax/post-tax deductions) to reflect the new investment accounts.

You can then create reports on each of the accounts, along with proper tracking of investments, divs, int, contributions, performance etal. as well.

mshiggins

Scooterlam said:

I would break the investment types (401k, Roth, After-tax) into separate accounts and adjust your paycheck wizard categories (pre-tax/post-tax deductions) to reflect the new investment accounts.

@Scooterlam , have you seen any downsides to splitting your 401(k) into separate accounts?

I started about 2 years ago doing after-tax contributions and converting those to Roth. So far all in the one 401(k) account.

It would be a fair bit of work to move the after-tax and Roth transactions. Just wondering what the trade offs might be.

Pong Ching

Separating into different accounts is not an option for two reasons:

1. All contributions are moved into one account physically, it would be difficult to automatic transaction download from the brokerage firm.
2. After the funds are deposited into the account, securities are purchased. The funds used for purchasing stocks and mutual funds are combined from those 3 contributions -- it's not like each contribution buys its own set of security.

I could have done what I need to do without using the paycheck wizard by setting up separate categories. I think this should be an enhancement to the paycheck wizard.

IRS has rules for how much you can contribute to different types of 401K, So it's reasonable people want to track the amount to make sure they can either maximize the contributions or not to over contribute.

volvogirl

Aren't they in 2 separate accounts in real life at the 401K? ROTH should be kept separate.

Pong Ching

@volvogirl Maybe, But at Fidelity all 401K transactions (before tax, after tax, Roth) are all deposited to the same account, but they tag these transactions and provide you the details about the contributions. If you don't download the transactions, they are all combined without distinguishing the types of contribution.

Pong Ching

I meant to say: If you download the transactions from Fidelity ...

Jim_Harman

At T Rowe Price both regular and Roth 401(k) contributions go to one account. They maintain the Roth balance as a sub-account. If you eventually roll over the 401(k) into IRAs you will get separate Roth and Traditional accounts.

Scooterlam

mshiggins said:

Scooterlam said:

I would break the investment types (401k, Roth, After-tax) into separate accounts and adjust your paycheck wizard categories (pre-tax/post-tax deductions) to reflect the new investment accounts.

@Scooterlam , have you seen any downsides to splitting your 401(k) into separate accounts?

I started about 2 years ago doing after-tax contributions and converting those to Roth. So far all in the one 401(k) account.

It would be a fair bit of work to move the after-tax and Roth transactions. Just wondering what the trade offs might be.

@mshiggins, Sorry, I mistook in the OP "after-tax" as being a contribution to a taxable brokerage account. Looking back to my 401K account in Quicken, my employer also combined my before and after tax contributions, which I delineated, in the paycheck wizard, by using the memo field. So, I had the same issue as @Pong Ching in terms of reporting by account.

FWIW...At the time, 7 years+ ago, my employer provided guard-rails on contribution limits, so no IRS issues for either of us. I was more interested at that point in overall brokerage account balance, investment allocation and investment performance. The custodian was Chase and they also maintained the after-tax contributions as a sub-account.

@Pong Ching I assume you are using Fidelity NetBenefits? There seems to be a fair amount of posts in the community around NetBenefits so maybe someone can give some additional insights specific to that custodian! If nothing comes up, perhaps you can generate an Idea Post describing your "want".