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How do you handle investments? Spending or just delete? (Q Mac)

Renegade6

Hi - I'm new to Quicken and had a question. How do you handle investments in your monthly tracking?
For example, I made a $2500 contribution to Vanguard for my taxable investment account. Quicken is tracking that under "spending," but is it really spending? I'm saving/investing that money - not spending it. Should I just delete the transaction or classify it as something else? Thank you!

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jacobs

How did you enter that $2500 transaction? Is it a Transfer, or did you assign a category to it? Typically, this would be recorded as a transfer from checking to the brokerage account, with no category. Transfers won't show up in a report of spending. (Transfers currently do show up in the Home Dashboard for top spending Payees, but I believe the developers have said they're going to fix it in a future release so transfer don't; show up there, either.)

Renegade6

It auto-populated since it was leaving my bank account. However, I did not set up my Vanguard investment account with Quicken. I categorized it as "financial" but it is still showing up as "spending"

Jon

If you aren't going to track your investment account in Quicken, then as far as Quicken is concerned you're spending the money because it's leaving your hands & going somewhere else. The only way Quicken knows the money is still yours (and isn't being spent) is if it is transferred to another account in Quicken.

If there's a particular report you're looking at to track your spending, you could customize your report to exclude that Category; that way you wouldn't see it.

Edit: @jacobs answer below is another option; I didn't realize you could use Transfer as a category without specifying a destination.

jacobs

If you’re not tracking the destination of the money, then use the special category “Transfer”. This tells Quicken the money went (or came from) somewhere outside Quicken’s world, and because it’s not income or expense, it will be excluded from reports.

Renegade6

Thanks very much!