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Current Inability to Create Registered Investment Accounts in USD

MRT1953

When manually creating Registered Investment Accounts in the current version of Quicken Canadian Home & Business (Windows), I can specify USD as the currency, but the actual account is created in CAD! We currently have half a dozen Registered Investment accounts in USD, and I have created/recreated one account but using a Non-Registered Investment Account in USD. This USD > CAD error is repeatable, and rather frustrating…

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Chris_QPW

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20459619#Comment_20459619

If you bring up the Capital Gains report and look at the Customization dialog one thing that might pop out to you is there isn't tab for categories. And since the use of categories are the way Quicken ties in tax lines, clearly this report isn't using tax lines (and categories for that matter the buy and sell transactions don't have categories).

So, exactly what is Quicken doing (and has been doing forever)?

When you pull up the report (or any tax report for that matter) if an account has "Tax deferred" selected in the Account Details it will not include that account in the report, and therefore those gains "aren't taxable". That is all they are doing to separate taxable from nontaxable. And you can even override this by just customizing the report to including/excluding the account.

Note I don't even see any affect for when you select "Tax Free" when you select that in the Security Details, not that it would be the right thing to select in this case.

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Arctic Hare

You'll have to better explain by what you mean by "the actual amount is created in CAD". I have several CAD and USD investment accounts in the same version of Quicken and it works fine. You might need to provide some screen shots to illustrate what isn't working for you.

FWIW, I recommend NOT using the RRSP account type in Quicken. Using that account type doesn't provide any functionality that isn't also available by using the Brokerage account, which I find works better.

MRT1953

My apologies for the typo, Arctic Hare! I meant to type "the actual account is created in CAD". And, yes, I have several non-registered investment accounts in both CAD and USD, and all is well, swapping funds between these. Given that I have recently modified all registered transactions (interest, dividends, accrued gains & losses) to reflect either …NT (RRIF, LIF, RRSP, RPP) or …TaxFree (TFSA), my annual income summaries are now better segregated between registered and non-registered for tax reports. I'll confirm that I can use the "Other Income" category in non-registered accounts, and use the …Nt or …TaxFree using the one existing USD RRSP created as a non-registered USD investment account.

Arctic Hare

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20459142#Comment_20459142

I just tried creating a RRSP account, selected USD as the currency for the account, and I got the same result as you - a new account containing no transactions that has the currency locked to CAD. This appears to be a BUG.

While I don't like (or use) the RRSP accounts for other reasons, I do believe that the RRSP accounts should have the same multi-currency capability as other investment accounts in the Canadian version. I do recommend that you report this apparent BUG to Quicken by doing both of the following:

calling Quicken phone support, demonstrating it to them, and, if necessary, getting it escalated to Tier 2 support; and
using the Report a Problem feature in Quicken to report it.

The workaround is to use a Brokerage account, set the Tax Related flag, and put RRSP in the account name. Again, I am not aware of any special functionality in the RRSP account type. Quicken has used the USA 401(k) account type as the basis for the RRSP account, but I don't believe that comes with any functionality you can't get otherwise.

Chris_QPW

I was going to comment on this but I figured I'd wait for people that are actually using the Canadian version. As I remember it, both the US and the Canadian versions assume that if it's a retirement account that'll be in the currency of that country.

I agree it shouldn't be this way, but it has been this way forever.

Arctic Hare

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20459156#Comment_20459156

If that is the assumption, then it shouldn't let you choose a currency as part of the setup process. It is also a bad/false assumption.

One of the other problems with the RRSP account is that assumes that it is tied to an employer. Quicken doesn't seem to understand that an RRSP in Canada may be tied to an employer, but that is not a necessity. I'll speculate that the majority of such accounts are not tied to an employer.

It is likely true that all RRSP accounts that are tied to an employer are in CAD funds, but a fair share of the ones not tied to an employer would be in USD.

Chris_QPW

Well, that is showing the fact that the Canadian version is for the most part (with the exception some of the better multiple currency support) lipstick on the US version. I'm betting they are using the 401K/403b rules of the US, which do require it be connected to an employer, and have all that kind of setup. Note that there are also the IRA accounts in the US that aren't connected to an employer, but that is just it, they can't be connected to an employer.

So, for the "wizards" clearly Canada requires a mix of the two and have never gotten that specialization.

Arctic Hare

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20459184#Comment_20459184

I think this pretty much sums it up; however, I stick to my assertion that the special accounts offer no incremental functionality. In my view they limit functionality by making assumptions or forcing settings that may not be true.

MRT1953

Working through Frederick Vettese's book, "Retirement Income for Life", I tried running Quicken Income vs. Expenses Reports for the five years leading upto my retirement to benchmark the past. I discovered that Realised Gain (_RlzdGain) and Unrealized Gain (_Unrealized Gn) cannot differentiate between taxable gains in non-registered accounts, versus Non-Taxable and/or Tax-Free gains in registered accounts, for none of 401 k, RRSP, RRIF, or LIRA accounts. Thus there is no way to align incomes (earned and/or unearned) with past Realised Gains.

I have reported this as a problem to Quicken, with a recommendation that Quicken looks at the tax status of such accounts to assign gains into the correct "buckets.

Thoughts?

Chris_QPW

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20459619#Comment_20459619

So, exactly what is Quicken doing (and has been doing forever)?

Note I don't even see any affect for when you select "Tax Free" when you select that in the Security Details, not that it would be the right thing to select in this case.

dan011

I am also facing this bug too. I have existing RRSP accounts in USD which work fine. Today when I tried to create a new RRSP account with currency as USD. When I checked the status of the account after its created, its in Canadian dollars, and I can't transfer any US listed securities to this account. This seems like a bug since this used to work before.

Arctic Hare

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20462619#Comment_20462619

It may be a bug. It sounds like it is. The workaround is to use a brokerage account and, in my view, there is no downside/disadvantage to using the brokerage account. I don't see any utility in using the so-called RRSP account, which is actually a 401K account renamed "RRSP" to market Quicken to Canadians.

dan011

Thanks @Arctic Hare ! Yeah, I did what you said, add a brokerage account in US Dollars, then check the Tax deferred option. I also noticed that as I selected the Tax deferred option, the Account details dialog box shows a new button "Convert to RRSP", though I didn't click it and left it as a brokerage account.

MRT1953

Dan011, please report this bug as I did. I have followed Arctic Hare’s guidance by creating a USD brokerage a/c, checked Tax-deferred, and converted it into an RRSP. I’ve used it for six weeks of transactions, so not a lot of transactions, but it seems to work. However, in my quest to track Dividends & Interest into seperate buckets; taxable, tax-deferred (RPP, RRSP, RIF, & LIF) and not-taxable (TFSA), the Taxable Income by Security report worked correctly by only showing taxable dividends and interest, BUT if you need to select “Other Income” if You want to see all three buckets of ROI. Note that I’ve yet to find out how to tweak Income Reinvestment transactions into Tax Deferred or Non-taxable. Ah, 32 years of Quicken workarounds…

Arctic Hare

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20462740#Comment_20462740

@MRT1953 Could you please elaborate/clarify what you meant by "BUT if you need to select “Other Income” if You want to see all three buckets of ROI." I'm interested in what you are explaining, but not sure I'm understanding what you've said…

MRT1953

Arctic Hare, my version of Quicken Canada for Windows defaults to entering dividends and interest income into _DivInc and _IntInc, regardless of whether it is taxable (Non-Registered), tax-deferred (Registered) or non-taxable (TFSA). So to differentiate between taxable income and all others, I create dividend and interest transactions using "Other Income", and manually elect which bucket I use (Categories below). Complicated, yes, but useful for tax optimization purposes. PS: yes, I could do a better job or renaming them more consistently, but I'm alert to the risk of some future version of Quicken crushing their default categories, leaving me four thousand plus transactions to amend/update!!!

Arctic Hare

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20462846#Comment_20462846

Thanks @MRT1953 That helps me understand what you are doing. I still don't understand the value of that extra tracking effort, but that may be due to some gap in my investment knowledge. It does provide additional information, but its not obvious how I would take action based on that information. However, in my case, nearly all of my investments sit in tax deferred and tax free holdings, so there is even less value in understand tax implications, because there are no tax implications presently (there are, of course, deferred implications).

MRT1953

Being retired with funds covered by several tax jurisdictions, I need to manage what I pull out of which accounts in which country to optimize taxes, so my scenario might not reflect the common user. However, I have struggled to record my net worth in Quicken as each tax-deferred account should have a matching account which documents that future liability. My first attempt was to create one Liability account, calculate the liability and record it monthly. After a year doing this with only one of a dozen possible accounts, that was a pain to raise and lower the liability as the account balance ebbs and flows with the market. Now, I just have a single forward-focused transaction which I manually update monthly upon receipt of my account balances. I'd love it if Quicken could automate the process using "Tax Liability = XX%", but I'll have spent all my savings and be six foot under before it's a value-added Quicken feature - LOL

Chris_QPW

Let me state this again. This kind of thing has come up many times (not just in the Canadian version). People see the _IntIncTaxFree and think that Quicken is going to use these "TaxFree" categories in some "Security action" it isn't. There aren't separate security actions for these and as such it would be impossible for Quicken to use them. What's more people have to realize that this is also tied to what the financial institutions send. Bottom line is that it looks like at one time they planned for this, but it never happened. And it isn't the way it is done, and I'm extremely doubt it is ever going to change.

Arctic Hare

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20462881#Comment_20462881

Right or wrong as I may be, I long ago concluded that there was marginal utility/value in attempting to model the future with such precision because life happens. That is, unless you start running a Monte Carlo simulation on how life risks and world events would impact your situation, there is a point where more accuracy is a false sense of accuracy… or, maybe this is must my way of justifying my own laziness and ability to procrastinate?