My investment portfolio was out of balance

albertdog

On 11/18 a 25k bond was redeemed but still showed on my portfolio, The broker invested the 25k in government bonds which also appeared on the portfolio. However, the total balance for the accounts were out of balance by about 50k until 11/30 when the account seems to be back in balance. I didn't make any investing decisions on the Quicken spread sheet, but other people can have the same problem and make wrong decisions on the wrong info.

Tom Young

I'm not exactly following along with you in the description of events but I'm not surprised that "bonds" seem to be throwing you out of whack.

Are you relying on "downloads" to enter transactions into the Investment Account? If so, the hard fact of life is that downloads from brokers often don't work properly, resulting in errors both in the accounting for the event(s) and balances that are misstated. Frequently you have to delete what they've sent you and make your own entries to get both the accounting correctly stated and the positions in balance with the "real world."

It would be extremely helpful to get a screen shot (or shots) showing the entries for the "redemption" event and the entry for the subsequent "invested" event and the resulting balance errors. That would allow for some specific instructions as to how to set things right.

Problems with bond entries sent to Quicken by brokers is a common problem. For example, when a bond held at Schwab matures Schwab sends a "Deposit" transaction for the full amount of the maturity (principal + any interest). That puts the cash into the Account but, importantly, doesn't remove the bond that matured and doesn't split that maturity amount between principal and any interest. That sort of sounds like what you encountered with the 11/18 redemption/maturity; the bond was still being show as an owned security and you had the redemption/maturity cash in the Account, a "double counting."

In the situation I've described above the "cure" is to delete that downloaded deposit entry and make your own entry or entries, depending on whether the deposit amount contains both principal and interest. Assuming the deposit amount does include interest you'd typically make two entries in its place, one for the "sale" (redemption/maturity) of the bond with any resulting gain or loss, and a second IntInc entry for the interest.