529 plans

Tim Strigenz

Hello!
I have my 3 kids' 529 plan through the NY state plan.
Most of the NY investment options are "blends" of Vanguard funds.
For instance, their "aggressive growth portfolio" is 60% Vanguard Total Stock Market index and 40% Vanguard Total International Stock Index Fund.

Is there a way in quicken for me to create a fund that would mimic this blend. Or what would be the best way to do this, to track this in quicken?

Make the assumption I am more a science guy than an accounting guy, and though I love quicken, my knowledge on how to do this stuff is fairly limited and novice-like.

thank you!

Ps56k2

Not sure what you are asking...

Is the NY 529 plan not listed as avail for downloading from Quicken ?
You can always do it manually, and update the fund price and any transactions when you receive statements.
I did this for our Illinois Brightstart plan - and just manually entered any transactions, and also the price.

If you are asking how to track the performance of the Vanguard funds -
you can simply add them to the Quicken Security List, and checkmark [x] the Watch List for downloading....

Jim_Harman

It appears that Quicken can access this account and download your transactions and holdings. Assuming you have Deluxe or higher, you should be able to add the account as an investment account by going to Tools > Add account and searching for "New York 529 College Savings". Because the securities it holds are not publicly traded, you should get price updates when you update the account but not from Quicken's quote provider.

Because the money in the account is not actually yours after you have contributed to the account, I would mark the account Separate in Quicken so it is not included by default in your net worth and other reports.

Tom Young

There's really no way to create a pseudo security that's going to track the blend in the sense of downloading transactions or quotes.  I suppose you could kind of "back into" some semblance of what's going on my determining how many shares of of each actual fund divides your contributions into a 60/40 weighting, but I don't really see that working very well

My 529 plan is invested in the same portfolio and since this is a long-term gamble - grandchild is 5 years old - I see no need for a day-by-day tracking of each market wiggle. So I created a pseudo security named "Vanguard Aggressive Growth Portfolio" and each time Vanguard buys more shares, (we have a quarterly schedule of draws; dollar cost averaging, you know), I manually make that entry in his file based on what Vanguard is showing, and then each month I post an end-of-month quote.