Is it possible to schedule a monthly sale of stock or other asset? (Q Mac)

cwp654

I am familiar with scheduling re-occurring bills and income but what about scheduling monthly sales of stocks, mutual funds or other assets?

Tom Young

I can't see any way of doing that using the Manage Bills & Income Reminders since there's no access to investment “Actions” (e.g., Sold) using that tool. One way that might work, (maybe), would be to copy an existing sales transaction in an Investment Account and then paste that transaction at a future date or dates in the Account. Seems like that might work if you're using average cost or have a default costing method of FIFO set up.

cwp654

Thanks but not quite right. I may turn the account into a bank account so that I can make scheduled withdrawals and then adjust for sales price and number of shares each month manually. Not quite what I was hoping for from Quicken.

MontanaKarl

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20345642#Comment_20345642

Let's back up a step… and imagine what you think should happen if scheduling sales of securities was allowed? There is no possible way to know the value of the sale until it actually completes, so I'm not sure what the point is vs simply downloading the sale transaction after the FI has made it? What should happen when a scheduled sale is for more shares or other quantity of an asset than you own? Etc.

If you want to schedule the sale of an asset, do that on the trading page of your brokerage firm. If they don't allow it… then I suppose that will be “not quite what [you] were hoping for from [brokerage-X]”.

This request to have Quicken schedule a sell (or buy) transaction in a brokerage account makes no sense to me at all.

RickO

There is no way to schedule a brokerage transaction (buy, sell, etc.) in QMac. I agree with @MontanaKarl that it would be easiest to just accept a downloaded transaction. But what if the account is offline only? The best I can suggest is to do a quick search in the register for the security in question. Then duplicate the last transaction and open it, change the date, and adjust the share price as necessary.

cwp654

You're right - I would not have Quicken conduct a scheduled sale for me. In this case I have an annuity that pays me $$$ each month with little deviation in shares or dollars. The money comes from the anuity and goes to my checking account automatically. I make an entry each month in both accounts and I was hoping to automate it but does not seem to be a way. Case closed.

RickO

you can schedule the cash transfer to the checking account, just not the security sale.

jobworker

I do that with Schwab where I get a monthly infusion of cash to my bank account. I do not do anything in quicken to account for the sale of the stock but do schedule the transfer of the resulting cash. At times there is no sale of stock because there is enough cash in the account. Other times there has to be a sale and when that is done I also get a download of the sales information. It works well for me.