Vanguard Cash Position

Eastwayroad

It seems that Vanguard recently changed how cash is held in their brokerage accounts. Cash now flows into a sweep/settlement position- as either a Federal Money Market fund or "Cash Deposit".

I switched to the cash deposit option but when I download transactions Quicken displays that position as just another fund holding, rather than as the bottom line "cash balance" in the register. Is there a way to designate that position to show separately as cash?

QWin Classic

Jim_Harman

Vanguard's Cash Deposit program is an FDIC insured alternative to the Federal Money Market fund as the settlement fund in a brokerage account. You can choose either one.

From what I have heard, until recently, Cash Deposit money did not download correctly into Quicken. The Federal Money Market fund has always been handled as a separate holding, with automatic buys and sells downloaded to sweep uninvested cash in and out.

Apparently they have recently fixed the Cash Deposit downloads so as you have seen, they work the same as the Federal Money Market.

If you want your uninvested cash at Vanguard to show as Cash in Quicken, you must delete or not accept the automatic Buys and Sells.

Eastwayroad

"If you want your uninvested cash at Vanguard to show as Cash in Quicken, you must delete or not accept the automatic Buys and Sells".

Where do I take that action?

Jim_Harman

Are you using Complete tracking mode for the Vanguard account, so there is a register that shows all the transactions? If so, you would enter a manual Sell transaction for the balance of the settlement fund. Then when you download transactions going forward, do not accept the Buy and Sell transactions for the settlement fund. This will keep all the cash that would have been in the settlement fund in the account's Cash.

When the settlement fund pays a dividend at the end of the month, you must edit it to be a Dividend rather then a Reinvest.

If you do this and you do a Reconcile Shares, it will report that you have 0 shares of the settlement fund. You should ignore this and not let Quicken create a Placeholder.

It is up to you if you want to live with these manual corrections to the downloads or just accept that the cash will be shown as shares in the settlement fund.

If you are using Simple tracking, where the account shows a dashboard with 4 large rectangles, I think you must live with the cash being shown as shares.

Eastwayroad

I manually sold the settlement funds as you suggested. Now successfully showing as cash. When new cash arrives via a dividend I will reject entry into that fund, also as suggested, and hopefully will land in the cash balance.

Thanks