Tracking a "Account Group Annuity Contract" with Fidelity

gdrudolph

I'm trying to track a Fidelity Investment option called "New York Life Anchor Account". It has no ticker. Quicken is not tracking this properly... I'm familiar with the Edit Security Details but can find the right mix in this window for this asset class..annuity.

The dollar value of one mutual fund's share is always $1.00.

Thanks in advance...

Boatnmaniac

Annuities can only be manually tracked in Quicken. The issue with trying to track the individual securities that make up an annuity with downloaded quotes/share values is that often those individual securities are private securities specific to the annuity, not publicly traded securities.  Those private securities might have the same name as their publicly traded counterparts but can have very different prices and allocation mixes.

Because of these differences, the information you are looking for cannot be downloaded from Fidelity.  You will need to get it from New York Life's documentation and then manually enter it.  If you cannot get it from the documentation that you should have been provided when you purchased the annuity or from New York Life's website, perhaps your Fidelity advisor can point you in the right direction or provide it to you.

I have annuities with Thrivent and New York Life.  It took me a lot of time to find that information for the Thrivent annuity and even more time periodically manually updating Quicken.  So much so that I did not even try to do that for the New York Life annuity.   I just now classify the Type for both annuities as "Other" and created "Annuity" as a custom Asset Class for them.  This more closely aligns Quicken with how Fidelity and Thrivent tracks our investments....as Annuities (or as insurance products) and not as the individual funds that comprise the Annuities.

But, when I did track the Thrivent one to that level of detail in Quicken I set up the annuity as an Other Investment Account and then manually entered the securities in the annuity account as holdings.  Periodically I would then manually update the securities holdings in that annuity Investment Account via add/remove shares and manually update the share prices of each security.   It worked but there was nothing fast and easy about that process.

This is not just an issue with annuities.  It is also an issue with some 401K plans, Pension Plans and other tax deferred accounts.

Boatnmaniac

Annuities can only be manually tracked in Quicken. The issue with trying to track the individual securities that make up an annuity with downloaded quotes/share values is that often those individual securities are private securities specific to the annuity, not publicly traded securities.  Those private securities might have the same name as their publicly traded counterparts but can have very different prices and allocation mixes.

Because of these differences, the information you are looking for cannot be downloaded from Fidelity.  You will need to get it from New York Life's documentation and then manually enter it.  If you cannot get it from the documentation that you should have been provided when you purchased the annuity or from New York Life's website, perhaps your Fidelity advisor can point you in the right direction or provide it to you.

I have annuities with Thrivent and New York Life.  It took me a lot of time to find that information for the Thrivent annuity and even more time periodically manually updating Quicken.  So much so that I did not even try to do that for the New York Life annuity.   I just now classify the Type for both annuities as "Other" and created "Annuity" as a custom Asset Class for them.  This more closely aligns Quicken with how Fidelity and Thrivent tracks our investments....as Annuities (or as insurance products) and not as the individual funds that comprise the Annuities.

But, when I did track the Thrivent one to that level of detail in Quicken I set up the annuity as an Other Investment Account and then manually entered the securities in the annuity account as holdings.  Periodically I would then manually update the securities holdings in that annuity Investment Account via add/remove shares and manually update the share prices of each security.   It worked but there was nothing fast and easy about that process.

This is not just an issue with annuities.  It is also an issue with some 401K plans, Pension Plans and other tax deferred accounts.

gdrudolph

Thanks for the great insight here...

Boatnmaniac

gdrudolph said:

Thanks for the great insight here...

You are welcome.  I see there are a few other things I also should have mentioned: 

• For my New York Life annuity I set it up as an Offline IRA Account because this annuity is an IRA.  You could set it up as a different kind of account if you wish but make sure to select "Tax deferred" on the General tab of Account Details.
• If you will be getting distribution payments from your annuity, make sure that the Account Details has the correct Tax Schedule assigned to it so it gets captured properly in the Tax Reports and Tax Planner.  The one shown in the following picture is the correct one to use for annuity distributions.:
• I set up the Annuity as a manual Security, naming it "NY Life Deferred Annuity".
• I transferred into the account the amount of cash that would be used to purchase the annuity.  I then entered a Buy Shares transaction for that Security in the Annuity IRA Account...Qty = the number of shares that could be purchased @ $1.00/share (so if you bought a $100,000 annuity you would enter a quantity of 100,000 shares), Price = $1.00 per share, Cash comes from the account cash balance.  (Alternatively, you could skip the Cash transferred into account transaction and instead set up the Buy transaction so that the source of the cash is from a different external account.)
• About 1X per month, I enter a ReinvDiv transaction to update the account value to match what Fidelity shows on their website.
• If you get cash distributions:  Enter a Sell shares transaction for the quantity of shares needed to match the distribution amount @ $1.00 per share.  Transfer the cash to the applicable receiving account.  (NOTE: Let me know if your distributions will have tax withheld or if they will be distributed to another tax deferred account.  The distributions will need to be entered a bit differently so they are captured properly in the Tax Reports and Tax Planner.)
  

I hope this helps.  Let me know if you have any questions.