Schwab Money Market not added

Hen

Same guy with the Schwab TDA merger. I had a Schwab money market in TDA SWVXX When I tried to connect the TDA account with the new Schwab credentials or if I created a new Schwab account, the program asked me if I wanted to treat the money market as cash or a separate security investment. Unrelated to my money market question, Quicken crashed no matter how I connected the new Schwab accounts.

I ended up starting anew with a brand new Quicken file. This time I was not asked about how to characterize the money market fund. It neither appears as cash, nor an investment. It did download dividends from the MM fund, but there was no placeholder nor were there transactions from moving MM funds to the brokerage account or from the brokerage account to the MM.

When I move money from one to the other, I want that to be recorded as a transaction.

Boatnmaniac

I can't speak to what happened with regard to your 1st paragraph (why Quicken crashed).

But regarding your 2nd and 3rd paragraphs: Does what you are seeing look something like this?

If so, this is called the Simple Tracking method. It does not show any transactions. Instead it just reports the type of information as shown in this picture. Some users want to see just this higher level information and are not at interested in seeing all of the transactions details so it meets their needs.

The more traditional register view is called Complete Tracking. Switching from Complete Tracking to Simple Tracking works pretty well but switching from Simple Tracking to Complete Tracking usually results in past securities transactions not being visible….only cash related transactions will be visible in the register. There is no way to backfill those missing securities transactions short of manually entering them. (Actually, there is another way by manually downloading and importing transactions via the Web Connect method but Schwab does not support Web Connect.)

I think your best bet to switch from Simple Tracking to Complete Tracking is to:

1. Backup your data file.
2. Edit > Preferences > Investments > uncheck the box for Default to Simple investing for new accounts > Downloaded Transactions > check the box for Never interpret downloaded Money Market funds as cash > OK.
3. Account Register > upper right Gear icon > Edit Account Details > Online Services tab > Deactivate > OK.
4. Add Account > Offline Accounts tab > select the type of Investment account your Schwab account is > follow the process to complete the set up of this offline account….select the date that the Schwab account was opened (if you do not know, just enter a date that you know is before the date the account was actually opened at Schwab since you will be able to adjust it later)…no need to enter any cash, securities or share quantities.
5. In this new manual account: Account Register > Edit Account Details > General tab > make sure Complete is selected for the Tracking Method > OK.
6. Add Account > select the Schwab setup link to set up downloads > when prompted, make sure the downloaded data is Linked to your new offline account.

Your new Schwab account should now show shares transactions and, hopefully, the SWVXX MMF shares transactions will also be present.

If/when you are satisfied with what you are seeing in the new Schwab account, you can delete your old Schwab account. Or you can keep it open for now but then I would suggest that you go to Account Register > upper right Gear icon > Edit Account Details > Display Options > check the box for Keep this account separate…. > OK. This will keep the account open until you are ready to decide what to do with it but it will move it to the bottom of your Accounts List on the left side of the screen and will keep it out of your reports and planning tools.

Did any of this help? Or did I misunderstand what the issue is?

Hen

Thanks but I was already using Complete Tracking. As it is a Money Market Fund the value (hopefully) is always $1 so I just added back in the missing shares.
It did pick up on the transfer of the latest (and only the latest) dividends from TDA. It should be too much trouble to change future dividends to reinvestments.

Hen

Quicken is not seeing this mutual fund SWVXX in my account, when I do an update. It insists I own 0. I tried adding it, I tried buying it

Boatnmaniac

Sure seems like your Schwab account is set up to not include this MMF in your account and instead include the value of those MMF shares in the Cash Balance. This is all described in this Alert: SWVXX (Value Advantage Money Market Fund) and SWGXX (Schwab Government Money Fund).

There is actually quite a discussion about this subject in this thread (click on the date to see the entire thread). You can do a search in this forum and will find many other discussions about this subject.:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20230096#Comment_20230096

If this is what is happening with your Schwab account, you would get cash dividend transactions downloaded but ReinvDiv transactions will not download.

Schwab is not the only investment company to do this. Fidelity does as well (I have 7 accounts there that do not download the settlement account MMFs shares and they have been doing this since at least the early-2000s) as do several others. Instead the value of those MMFs is included in the Cash Balance. Their perspective is that these MMFs are really settlement funds and should be treated like Cash, not as investments, in much the same manner that the more traditional sweep accounts are.

Does your account's Cash Balance match what Schwab has downloaded? The easiest way to check is to click on the blue font Cash Balance dollar amount on the right below the register.

Also, does the downloaded Cash Balance dollar amount equal the value of SWVXX + any real cash that might be held in that account? If so, then maybe the easiest solution is to stop trying to hold shares of SWVXX and remember that Cash = SWVXX and SWVXX = Cash. That is what I do with my Fidelity accounts and it works quite well for me.

BTW, in that thread I referenced above are some posts by people who said they were able to reverse how this MMF is treated in Quicken. But note that others have said those "fixes" did not work for them. Still you might want to see if any of the "solution" steps works for you.

Hen

Thank you for the link, I'll check it out.

On my very first attempts at switching over to Schwab, Quicken asked if I wanted it treated as cash or an investment, but whatever I chose, it seemed to be added to cash.

When I started over, quotes were downloaded from the middle of February, I have no idea what the starting cash balance would have been. It could be that my cash balance is the combo of SWVXX and brokerage cash. I have been dealing with Placeholder transactions, which seem to come back from the dead.