Why does Quicken double my 401k account balance?

ɐʞoʎǝH

I have a Fidelity Net Benefits retirement account through my employer. Quicken includes the Vested Amount (my entire holdings are vested), as a Cash Balance. Our plan has no cash account. The cash balance is coming from the Vested Amount. This doubles the Portfolio Value, as well as throwing off all Net Worth and Holding Reports.

Boatnmaniac

I suspect that your account in Quicken has cash contributions (by you and/or by your employer) being deposited into your 401k account....these would show up in the account register as XIn transactions and will show up in the Quicken as Cash Balance.  These XIn transactions are usually placed there by Paycheck Reminders when they get entered into checking accounts but they can also be downloaded transactions from Fidelity NetBenefits.

Then when the shares are purchased and added to the account they would be Add Shares or BoughtX transactions instead of Bought transactions.  If this is the case, then these transactions will not decrement the Cash Balance created by the XIn transactions.

To fix this issue, I suggest you first backup your data file and then edit the Add Shares or BoughtX transactions and change them to Bought (will show up in the Edit Transaction dialog as Buy - Shares Bought) and select the cash source as From this account's cash balance.  Then they will decrement the Cash Balance.

Another way to fix this issue would be to delete all of the XIn transactions but if some/all of them are created by a Paycheck Reminder doing this will cause issues with the completed Paycheck deposits since the total of the Split Categories will no longer match the transaction Deposit amount.

The reason why I suspect this is happening is that I used to have a 401k account with Fidelity NetBenefits and this describes the Cash Balance issue that I had.

Chris_QPW

Are you using Simple investing mode where it shows a "Dashboard" instead of the investment transaction register?

It has been reported that for some financial institutions that with 401K accounts people are getting exactly what you are describing. And as a matter of fact, I believe Fidelity was one of the financial institutions with this problem.