TIAA - updating balance on a placeholder does NOT add another placeholder

ET99

I have tiaa traditional and quicken has never really supported this, so I have to manually change the balance, which I do once a month. If I click on the placeholder, and click on edit, it takes me to a special version of the adjust share balance dialog.

The comment on this dialog states: "Enter the total number of shares you own on this date. Quicken will add a placeholder entry to make your quicken holdings agree with the number you enter.

I change the transaction date to today, and change the number of shares (which is actually just the balance in this interest only paying investment) and it does NOT create another placeholder, rather it simply modifies the single placeholder I just edited. I want it to create another one with the difference.

The problem is that I cannot get accurate reports to show how this investment has grown over the years because it appears to quicken that the one placeholder increased the balance one time instead of say, once a month when I adjust the number of shares. How can I get it to create another placeholder with the difference between this last placeholder and a new one.

Jim_Harman

You are right that TIAA Traditional does not download correctly, and never has. It has a constant share price of $1.00 and the number of shares you hold increases daily, like a reinvested dividend.

Each time I download transactions from TIAA, it creates an Added transaction for 0 shares. It could download a ReinvDiv for every day since the last download, but that would make a very messy register. One way to handle this is to enter a ReinvDiv for the dividend that has been paid since the last download at a share price of $1.00.

The way I do this is as follows:

1. I do not include TIAA in my One Step Update because I update frequently and I don't want a lot of Reinvest transactions in the register. Once a month I click on the gear at the top right of a TIAA account and select Update Transactions.
2. I accept the downloaded Added transaction of 0 shares.
3. After clicking Done at the end of the download, Quicken shows that XXX.XX shares of TIAA Traditional are missing. I note this down but do not accept the Placeholder.
4. I edit the Added transaction to make it a Reinvest Dividend for $XXX.XX, buying XXX.XX shares.
5. To confirm that I have entered the transaction correctly, I click the gear again and select Reconcile Shares. This should produce the message "Your Quicken account and Brokerage holdings are in agreement."

Please try this and let us know if it works for you.

NotACPA

It's because of necessary nonsense such as this, in dealing with TIAA, that I'm SO GLAD we finally got the last of my wife's funds out of there in July.

Returns were mediocre also. She's getting MUCH better performance with a Fidelity Rollover IRA.

ET99

I have 5 tiaa contracts and a total of 6 tiaa traditional accounts. When I tried the update transactions on a copy of the data file, it generated dozens of entries. Unfortunately, I could find no command to undo that or to delete everything except the one with the 0 added. Un-accepting 8 or 9 transactions is quite tedious. So, I gave up and went back to my backup.

One problem I encountered which was a real pain is that with my poor eyesight I have to use the large fonts. This can generate dialogs that I cannot escape from, since all the ok, cancel, etc. buttons are off screen and there's no way to move the dialog which is bigger than my 1080p screen.

I guess my only recourse is to continue with my current procedure. I download a quicken file, parse it with a custom script to get the new totals, and then have it semi-automatically update the 6 placeholders (by injecting keystrokes to change the date and paste the new balances).

As to tiaa traditional, I have it set to withdrawal the yearly minimum distribution from the tiaa trad accounts. That's the best I can do to drain this fund.