Advice please: repairing "broken" Fidelity 401k accounts

KDL

Over the past few years I have been living with a handful of problems with a couple of Fidelity 401k accounts (IBM 401k accessed through Netbenefits.com). The problems:

1. My wife and I both have accounts, under different userids, but downloaded transactions from my accounts routinely get added to my account.
2. Securities that I renamed in Quicken are no longer matching holdings reported by Fidelity, because Fidelity reports the original names.
3. Today I discovered that price history for a couple securities that I've held for years has been deleted, so my historical net worth is all wrong unless I manually edit the price histories for years.

Suffice it to say I can't live with the manual corrections any longer. So, I plan to create new version of these accounts in Quicken, linked to those in Netbenefits, and basically start over as of 2024.

Questions:

1. Would it be best to let Quicken download all the holdings fresh, or should I create a blank account and then, in Quicken, transfer the securities? Or will this perpetuate the mess?
2. If I let Quicken download everything fresh, what do I do with holdings in the old accounts to avoid duplicate assets? Just remove the securities from the accounts?
3. If I let Quicken download everything fresh, what's the best way to look at historical performance of the securities and/or the 401k as a whole? I think I lose all continuity with an abrupt move.

Anything else I should think about before taking the leap (besides backing up the file)?

I'm running Quicken Classic Premier R52.33 on Windows 10.

mshiggins

Are both your and your wife’s 401(k) accounts for the same employer - IBM?

Would you be willing to live with issue 1 if you could fix issues 2 and 3?

KDL

@mshiggins

Both 401ks are from IBM.

Could I live with issue 1, but fix issues 2 and 3? Yes, but it certainly shouldn't be necessary.

How do you suggest I proceed?

mshiggins

I agree, it should not be necessary to fix problems caused by Quicken program issues. But sometimes it is the lesser of two evils.

For issue #1, with you and your spouse working for the same employer, unfortunately you can’t fix that one. The 401(k) accounts aren’t really yours, they’re held in trust for you by the employer. So all the 401(k) accounts for your employer have the same account number, pretty much impossible to separate them. Issues with 401(k) for spouses with the same employer have been a long term problem.

For issue #2, it sounds like the securities are mismatched to their online counterparts. The fix for that is simple, see this post for the solution:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7944607/vanguard-vmfxx-downloads-as-vftsx

For your issue #3, the fix will depend on whether the lost prices are for publicly trades securities or non-publicly traded securities. Which type is it?