Schwab Money Market not added

Question

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.

Hen · Answer

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.

Boatnmaniac · Answer

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 · Answer

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