Estimated income

bmciance

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20404564#Comment_20404564

Yes! I use them for every dividend and interest payment I get. It works very well.

Jim_Harman

Reminders are a very useful Quicken feature. For basic info, see this Help page. Skip the section on Online bills.

https://help.quicken.com/display/WIN/Create%2Ba%2Bbill%2C%2Bincome%2C%2Bor%2Btransfer%2Breminder

For investing accounts, you can easily set up reminders for cash transactions. Follow the steps on creating an Income reminder and when you select an investing account, you can select Deposit, Dividend, or Interest. You can set the starting date and interval, the amount, the income type, and the security.

For more complex investing transactions, you can memorize transactions and set up Memorized Transaction Groups, but that is a topic for another discussion.

bmciance

One piece of advice for setting up reminders for dividends. I used to set up each one as they were declared just as a one time reminder. I was doing this because technically a dividend is not official until declared. Additionally, there are a number of companies that don't necessarily follow a quarterly schedule (Coca Cola for example. They pay in Mar, Jun, Sep and then Nov rather than Dec).

That said, I now set them up as recurring (quarterly generally but I do have several monthly also). If you do it this way you need to be on top of it because from time to time you will have a reminder for a dividend come up as due when the company hasn't even declared it yet. Or, in the case of Coca Cola, they will pay before your reminder says it is due if you don't update the reminder ahead of time. For most dividends it works nearly flawlessly though.

To help with this I keep a spreadsheet of all of my stocks with when I expect dividends to be declared and paid and I adjust the reminders as necessary. I get to be a little OCD about my dividend payments!

Gary R

I'm going to pass on the reminders

Appreciate all the replies to my original post.

Gary R

mshiggins SuperUser ✭✭✭✭✭December 20

@GaryR curious, what is your end goal to getting the estimated income amounts for all of your securities?

Unfortunately cannot achieve my end goal. I wanted to be able to see my total investment income next year. However, my two brokerage accounts are with Fidelity and Vanguard. I called both yesterday, and they walked me through how to view the total interest and dividend payments that will be paid next year. You can view these payments monthly.

If anyone has accounts with Fidelity and Vanguard and would like to know how to view these payments, I'll post it here.




Jim_Harman

 my two brokerage accounts are with Fidelity and Vanguard. I called both yesterday, and they walked me through how to view the total interest and dividend payments that will be paid next year. You can view these payments monthly.

Caveat: Those figures are also estimates, based on your current holdings and the dividends and interest they pay. If you make deposits or withdrawals, do any trading, or the securities' dividend payouts change, you would have to adjust the projections to keep them accurate.

The "best" approach to use for estimating income depends on several factors:

• What are you using the estimate for - projecting cash on hand, projecting taxes, or something else?
• How many securities are involved?
• How accurate does the estimate need to be?

I rely mostly on Reminders, which do a good job of of both projecting cash and feeding the Tax Planner, but as I said I only have a few taxable securities to track. Your situation may be different.

Gary R

Jim:

I like how much cash is coming in each month from my fixed income securities only. We have around 75 individual bonds, 12+ Treasuries, and over a dozen CD'S. I checked the amount received from both brokerages for the last two months, and it was exactly what Quicken posted for interest income.

Jim_Harman

Aha. If you are just tracking fixed income securities, then the income will be very predictable.

With 75 bonds, it would sure be nice if Quicken populated each bond's Est. Income box automatically.

Do the bonds all pay on the same schedule, or a limited number of schedules? If so, you could create a dummy income reminder for each schedule with the projected income for that group of securities. When the actual payments come through, you skip the Reminders. That would save you having to create a Reminder for each security, while still having Quicken track the projected income.

Another way to manage investing income that you treat as "spending money" is to have the securities pay their income to the investing account and then transfer a fixed amount each month to your checking account.

Gary R

all different different

Quicken not possible

mshiggins

@GaryR I would like to know how to view the total interest and dividend payments that will be paid next year for my Fidelity accounts.

Gary R

https://fixedincome.fidelity.com/ftgw/fi/FILanding

The site has been down this morning

Gary R

Fixed Income, Bonds, and CD'S

Then—Bond Tools on top of page

Then Fixed Income Analysis tool

All your fixed income show up here

Quicken Kathryn

Hi All,

I just wanted to let you know that in relation to this, we've developed an option for a future release that will estimate income (as requested in this idea post:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7878263/calculate-estimated-income-8-merged-votes

It will look similar to this:

If the quote feed amount is zero, Quicken will use the estimated amount from the security list regardless of the checkbox settings.

This is likely to be launched in a couple of release cycles—please let us know if you have any feedback!

Thanks—

Jim_Harman

@Quicken Kathryn please see my response to the proposed implementation just after yours in the Idea post.

Gary R

I may have asked this question before, but I'm going to ask again.

I have a dozen bank accounts set up in Quicken, most with CD's and some just money market. Is there any way to set these accounts up to be able to see the estimated income? I can't go to security view like all my brokerage accounts.

Jim_Harman

I have a dozen bank accounts set up in Quicken, most with CD's and some just money market. Is there any way to set these accounts up to be able to see the estimated income? I can't go to security view like all my brokerage accounts.

Quicken lets you set the "Account intent" for a bank account to Investing and that will make the account balance available in the portfolio views. But because these accounts cannot hold securities, there is no way to set the estimated income. In the Account Details for a bank account there is a place to enter the interest rate, but unfortunately this does not carry over to the Estimated Income column in the Portfolio views. That would be a nice enhancement. These repurposed bank accounts also behave strangely in the Investment Performance Report.

If you want to see the estimated income in the Portfolio views, you will have to set these accounts up as one or more investing accounts that hold securities corresponding to the CDs and other bank accounts. This will prevent you from downloading transactions and balances for these accounts.

Gary R

Thanks Jim for your reply