Roth IRA incorrect, using simple positions

slemay2

I have a Roth IRA account that the investment broker only allows me to use Simple Positions Only… which is fine. But the portfolio's value is showing 4x greater than it actually is. I've tried resetting the account (in the online services tab), but the balance continues to be 4x greater than reality (which I have verified logging into the investment bank website… it is 1/4 of the value that Quicken is showing). I'm at the point where I'd like just to delete the account and re-create it. However, Quicken is warning me that if I do this, "it will cause all transfers to or from this account to transfer to [Unspecified Account].

So my question is, if I let Quicken do this, is there an easy way to change every transaction that gets changed to [Unspecified Account] back to a transfer into this new account? I have years and years of transfers into this account (probably close to 1,000 transactions/transfers) - to edit them one at a time would be crazy.

I'm open to suggestions on other thoughts on how to fix this balance problem. FYI, I have run VALIDATE & REPAIR on my Quicken file - no problems were found/detected.

I'm on the latest release of Windows (R61.20).

Quicken Jasmine

Hello @slemay2,

Thanks for reaching out! I understand how frustrating it must be to see your Roth IRA account’s value incorrectly inflated, especially when using Simple Positions Only.

Before deleting and recreating the account, have you checked if the issue is tied to duplicate holdings or incorrect cost-basis reporting? When you view the Holdings tab, does Quicken show multiple entries for the same investments, or does it appear to be a miscalculation?

Regarding your concern about transfers moving to [Unspecified Account], have you checked if bulk editing is possible using Quicken’s Find and Replace tool? It may help speed up the process if relinking transfers becomes necessary.

Let me know what you've found so far!

Chris_QPW

I think one needs to think about how "Simple Positions Only" mode actually works.

When you do a downloading of transactions from the financial institution it gets both the transactions, and a summary of as the securities and cash held in the account. In the case of "Simple Positions Only" mode it uses the summary information to adjust what Quicken has.

So, Let's imagine that for whatever reason your securities and cash was way off in "Complete" mode, and you switched to "Simple", on the next download, it would put in Add/Remove shares, and Misc transactions to bring the shares and the cash in line with what was in the "summary information" downloaded from the financial institution. So, in theory, bringing that account back in line with what the financial institution has. Complete mode on the other hand, other than the "Compare Securities" (which might or might not cause placeholders if different) only goes off of the transactions downloaded/entered into the register.

So, why hasn't it fixed it in this case? There are two possibilities. One is that the information sent by the financial institution is wrong. The other is there is a bug in Quicken. I don't know of anyone reporting this problem on an IRA account, but I do know that for some financial institutions for 401K accounts they are seeing where the cash amount is being reported as the full amount of the account (when it should be zero), basically doubling the value of the account.

As such knowing which financial institution you are talking about is very important.

Second, Simple mode doesn't really get rid of the register, it just hides it. If you switch to Complete mode, you can see what transactions were placed there and that might give more insight of what Quicken is doing.