How do I link an Retirement IRA account to a spending Banking account

Krausepw

I receive dividend payments from my IRA brokerage account. I want to transfer those dividends to a Banking account. I have not found a way to make that link up.

bmciance

You don't "link" them.  All you do it record the transfer from the IRA to the banking account using a "cash transferred out of account" transaction in the IRA.  You would just specify the banking account in the "transfer account" box.

Edit: Oh, one other thing...just to be clear, are these dividends automatically transferred to the banking account and is the banking account part of your IRA account or are these transfers IRA withdrawals to a banking account outside of your IRA?

Jim_Harman

If the dividends transferred from the IRA to your banking account are taxable distributions, you should record them as Dividends in the IRA then go to the banking account and enter a transfer from the IRA there. This will ensure that Quicken handles them properly for tax purposes. Please see this FAQ
https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7072150/faq-best-way-to-handle-distributions-from-ira-also-rmd 

Also if you think Quicken should improve how it handles IRA distributions, please review and vote on this Idea post:
https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7864626/improve-handling-of-ira-distributions-including-qcds-and-roth-conversions

Krausepw

Yes, the the Banking account is part of the IRA and the transfers are automatic at the Brokerage. I would like them to be automatic in Quicken also.

Jim_Harman

Krausepw said:

Yes, the the Banking account is part of the IRA and the transfers are automatic at the Brokerage. I would like them to be automatic in Quicken also.

Unless you created the account years ago as part of a conversion from Microsoft Money, IRAs are not allowed to have linked cash accounts.

Are you downloading transactions for this account or entering them manually?

If downloading, what transactions are downloaded? Div? DivX? Div and Bought?

If entering manually, the simplest thing to do is to enter an ordinary Dividend transaction and let the cash show as Cash Balance in the IRA account. If you want to see the banking account as a separate account, you can use the cash to buy shares of a real or made-up money market fund at $1.00 each in the IRA account.  

Krausepw

I tried entering the dividend as income (a dividend) and the proceeds did not show up as anything. I have had a link associated with the IRA for too long and so apparently Quicken thinks it is being transferred. However, prior to Rev 39.21, this link did function and the dividend was transferred automatically as d DivX to the proper Bank account. After that Rev came out, this transferred no longer works. In addition, if the dividend is left in the account, it does not show as cash and can not be transferred manually. I have a new IRA account that I set up this last year and it is not linked because Quicken does not give me that option and it does show the cash in account, which I can transfer manually. I guess us old timers are stuck with whatever was originally set up and now have no ability to adjust to what this version of Quicken will allow. Any Ideas?

Jim_Harman

If you edit the Div transaction in the old account and blank out the entry next to Transfer account, the cash should show up in the account.

If that does not work, it may be because there is a Placeholder transaction in the account for that security at a later date than the transaction you are working on. If you select the Div transaction, you will see N/A in the Cash Amt column.

To make Placeholders visible, go to Edit > Preferences > Investment Transactions and make sure the Show hidden transactions box is checked. 

Placeholders will have a gray background in the account’s transaction list (register) even if they are not selected, and will have “Entry” in the Action column.

Placeholders compensate for missing or incorrect investing transactions by forcing Quicken’s share balance for a security to match a specified value. This is usually the share count downloaded from your financial institution (FI).

Because transactions are missing or incorrect, Quicken will not be able to compute the cost basis or performance for the affected securities. You will see asterisks in the Portfolio views for this data.

Placeholders also prevent new transactions like Div, Bought and Sold prior to the security’s Placeholder date from affecting the account’s cash balance. This shows up as N/A in the Cash Amt column of the transaction list. To allow the cash balance to change when entering missing transactions that affect the cash balance, you must first delete the Placeholder.

  

For information on resolving placeholders, please see this FAQ:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7267839/quicken-faq-managing-placeholder-entries-in-quicken-for-windows

Always back up your data file before changing historical transactions.

Krausepw

Thank you for all your comments. I have have made hard copy of all this and will get busy with Quicken and see what I need to do to get this resolved. I usually know pretty much about what my software can and will do but Quicken has grown so much since I started using it that with no manual, I guess you just have to look around and fry to figure out what is going on since you started using the tool. Thanks for your help.

Jim_Harman

Good luck! please let us know what the resolution is.

Krausepw

I have reviewed all that was discussed and made changes that now allow me to see the Placeholder entries. There are non which are ahead of the entries which I am making.

Since doing this, I have just spent time looking around in Quicken to see what I might see which might effect what I have been able to do in the past. In doing this I was looking at the two Traditional IRA accounts which are at the root of my concerns and I pressed the Holdings button to see the Holdings in each of the two IRA accounts. When I was looking at these accounts I suddenly realized that I was also seeing the Cash totals for the "linked cash accounts" so from this I think it is safe to say that I still have a working link.

My resent experience is that the Buying or Selling of Securities in these two accounts do move cash or take it from the linked cash account for each IRA. This is what we would expect. What I do not see is when I use the Transaction item called Income-(Div, Inc, etc.) in the past I would see DivX or IntX and this manual entry would be transferred to the associated cash account. This no longer happens and I see Div or Int as the transaction and no transfer is being made. I also do not see Cash Balance in the right lower corner where Securities Value is found. I have a recently opened Traditional IRA account which has no linked cash account and this account has Securities Value, Cash Balance and Total Market Value in that area.

My conclusion from all our work is that there is nothing that I can change to effect what I want to do. Apparently something was done with Rev 39.21 which "broke" Transaction entry Income entry so that it does not use the link to any associated Cash account for a transfer. I have sent feedback about this experience twice in the past and have not gotten their attention enough to have a fix included in any Revision so far. My first feedback was way back just after Rev 39.21 and one more more recently but so far, and I tested this yesterday and this transaction still does not work in the IRA accounts. Everything works just fine in my standard Brokerage account and its associated cash account. I guess my next step is to send another feedback to Quicken. Thanks for you assistance in any case.

Jim_Harman

Please make multiple paragraphs in your posts, it makes them much easier to read. I am afraid I deleted your recent post in an attempt to make it more readable.

To summarize, you have old 2 IRA accounts that have linked checking accounts. It appears that Buy and Sell transactions in those accounts work correctly, transferring cash to and from the linked account, but Div transactions do not. The IRAs with the linked cash accounts do not have a Cash Bal column in their transaction lists (registers), Other accounts that do not have linked checking accounts work correctly. Do I have that correct?

Re: Placeholders,  it is not clear what you meant by "There are non which are ahead of the entries which I am making." It is Placeholders for a later date than the entry you are trying to make that lock the cash balance. If you have these, you must delete them as described in my earlier post before you can enter Div transactions.

Krausepw

Yes, all that you say correctly summarizes my statement. I did try to make separate paragraphs but for some reason hitting Enter did not seem to mean anything in this comment box. Never had that happen using Microsoft Wood. I think I have gone about as far as I can with this forum. I tried to find a way to send written text to Quicken but other than using "Report a Problem" in Quicken's help line, I could not find a way using Quicken's Support on line. Trying to contact them seems to mean waiting and even when I tried to use that, it either did not work or meant I would have a six minute wait before I even knew if it was doing anything. I would think they would welcome helpful communication with their users. Guess no. I did send a report of problem however, so will wait and see if in the future anything changes. Since Quicken is the last of this type of software, I either like it or I do without. Not the best business model that I have ever heard. Anyway, thanks for your help. Tomorrow I will be doing a month end comparison of my account statements from the Brokerage against Quickens numbers. They usually are identical so do not expect any different. Just something I like to do and it gives me a little more security.

Jim_Harman

You will not get a response if you only use Report a problem, Quicken uses the Report a Problem submissions for statistical purposes and to help diagnose the issue. 

Unfortunately, reporting a problem here will not generally trigger any action by Quicken. I suggest you report the issue using the Help > Report a Problem link and also contact Quicken Support directly. Be sure the support agent understands the problem and gives you a ticket number for future reference.