I had Fidelity merge 3 old IRAs into one. How do I do that in Quicken and retain the cost data?

born2run

I had a traditional IRA and 2 different SEP IRAs from two different companies I used to own, all with Fidelity Investments. Now that I'm retired but not yet drawing from the IRAs, I wanted to simplify my paperwork and combine all the IRAs into one account. I called Fidelity and they made the transfer over the phone. Since these were all with Fidelity, they simply transferred the underlying investments in each account to the single surviving account, which retained all the cost data, dividends, etc. They did not CLOSE each account, they merely transferred the shares from one account into another. This is not so easily done in Quicken, however.

In Quicken, I opened the smaller of the accounts to merge from, pressed Enter Transactions, then dropped down to Shares Transferred Between Accounts and selected All Securities. (This account had 1 mutual fund, plus Cash.) On the small account, this worked fine. In the receiving account, it properly showed all the transactions for more than 21 years. The mutual fund shares and all historical data transferred to the receiving account.

When I did the same on the larger account (which includes 4 mutual funds plus Cash), Quicken handled it differently, even though the procedure I used was exactly the same. It Removed the shares from the larger account and Added them to the smaller account. Historical data did not transfer. Quicken effectively treated this like a Sale from the old account and a purchase into the new account. This account has 32 years of data.

Again, what Fidelity did in real life was to simply transfer the shares and cost data from each old account and move them into an existing account. Seems like I should be able to do that in Quicken. Anyone have any ideas how? Or why Quicken treated the second transfer differently than the first transfer? I'm desperate for a solution!

Rocket J Squirrel

I can't explain why you got 2 different results from the same action.

Is it possible that in the smaller account you actually performed a "Move Transactions" action? That is different from "Shares Transferred". It sounds like "Move Transactions" is really what you want if you want all the historical transactions merged into the destination account.

Move Transactions is in the gear menu at the top right of the investment register, not in the Enter Transactions menu, which makes it odd that you seem to have gotten that effect anyway.

born2run

Fortunately, I've kept a good backup and I keep trying with different tweaks. Looks like I finally figured it out. I went to Enter Transactions-->Shares Transferred Between Accounts-->select All Securities-->select Target Account and chose the account to transfer to. With 3 decades of transactions, it took awhile.

I didn't understand that the Cash wouldn't transfer with the step above. That required another step. I went back to Enter Transactions-->select Cash Transferred Out of Account-->select Transfer Account and chose the account to transfer to. It worked perfectly.

I've checked each account and the cost and dividend history transferred, and the balances lined up exactly with what Fidelity shows on the website. I've been fussing with this for nearly 2 weeks. Glad it's finally resolved. Hope this helps others who have struggled with similar transactions.

Rocket J Squirrel, thanks for the suggestion. If the above hadn't worked, I would have tried your suggestion next!

q_lurker

I've checked each account and the cost and dividend history transferred, 

What actually gets transferred is the acquisition of the shares, when they were acquired and at what cost; not the "dividend history".  Whether the shares were acquired by reinvested dividends, payroll purchases, reinvested cap gain distributions, purchases associated with separate contributions, or any other source is essentially lost to the new holding account.  That detail doesn't matter.

The method you ended up with is exactly the correct approach, in my opinion.      

Jim_Harman

... and the original transactions are still in the old accounts of you ever need to refer to them.