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Pre-Tax and Post-Tax Money All Held in Same Fidelity 401k Account

gfvalvo

Reading through the forum I see there's a problem with accounting for Roth contributions that Quicken still has not resolved.

I don't have a Roth, but I do have a semi-related issue with my 401k held at Fidelity. Up until this year, all my contributions were pre-tax and things worked fine with downloads from Fidelity. However, this year I hit the IRS pre-tax limit from regular salary withholding so I made the bonus withholding post-tax.

Of course, the transactions downloaded from Fidelity came as one big chunk … combining securities purchased with both pre and post-tax money. I simply accepted those transactions into my pre-tax Quicken 401k account. I then entered security transfers for the same day to move the post-tax purchased shares into a separate, off-line, Post-Tax 401k Quicken account that I created. That's fine since earnings on the Post-Tax securities will be tax-differed and downloaded into the pre-tax account as usual. Also the post-tax securities are now in their own account and I'll simply pay tax on their price gains when sold.

The remaining problem is that now every time I do a download from Fidelity, Quicken complains about a mismatch between the number of shares held in my pre-tax Quicken account verses the online Fidelity account.

Anyone have a suggestion for how to better handle recording of the post-tax contributions?

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Comments

Rocket J Squirrel

The bogus securities mismatch is a new bug introduced in QWin R45. It is not specific to your account setup. You can choose to roll back to R44.28 or just ignore it and hope it gets fixed.

Jim_Harman

In addition to the issue @Rocket J Squirrel reports, if you have moved the post-tax securities in your 401(k) to a different account, there will be a mismatch between the securities in your Fidelity account and your pre-tax account in Quicken.

You can disable the comparison by going to Edit > Preferences > Downloaded transactions > Compare account portfolio after download, but then you must reconcile your shares manually.

fanfare

don't even try to track post tax contributions separately.
when you take a distribution, Fidelity will calculate the taxable amount for you.

Delete that side-account and the transfers into it.

you need the true total balance to calculate your RMD.

mshiggins

Rocket J Squirrel said:

The bogus securities mismatch is a new bug introduced in QWin R45. It is not specific to your account setup. You can choose to roll back to R44.28 or just ignore it and hope it gets fixed.

I don’t think the issue is relevant in this case since the OP intentionally transferred the after tax shares to a different account. The share quantities will always be a mismatch if some shares are transferred to another account.

mshiggins

@gfvalvo, there is currently no elegant way to handle trying to track Roth, after-tax, and pre-tax 401(k) contributions and shares in Quicken. You’ll want to choose the inelegant method that works best for you.

The method you are currently using - transferring after-tax shares to a separate account - is one method. I chose a slightly different method, I have 3 separate securities all with the same symbol, but different names denoting their tax status.

I’m not sure if my method would eliminate the securities comparison mismatch as I’ve never liked the how the downloaded 401(k) transactions worked so do all my 401(k) transactions with Memorized Investment transactions in a Transaction Group.

gfvalvo

Thanks all. Since Quicken doesn't provide a "good" way of handling this, I'll leave it the way it is. I'll only be making one post-tax purchase per year to handle bonuses and will live with the comparison mismatches since I'll be able to account for all shares.

Sooner rather than later I hope to retire. At that time, the Pre and Post-Tax 401k balances will roll over to my personal brokerage account with the post-tax money going into my Roth. The pre-tax IRA and Roth balances at that brokerage properly download into separate Quicken accounts so there won't be the same issue as with Fidelity.