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Retirement accounts reinvesting dividends

Leslie Jones

There was a discussion from 2022, now closed, about retirement accounts downloading the Dividend and the same amount reinvested. One of the posters only listed the shares reinvested and not the Dividend. That is what I used to do when I manually entered the account info. Now that it is downloaded I find both amounts are there. The problem is the Dividend then shows up as a Dividend in any report I do so it shows as Income. Unless I do not select My IRA accounts (Fidelity, TRP, etc.) it will falsely add to my income as Quicken does not seem to differentiate between retirement and non retirement accounts. Any other suggestions besides deleting the Dividend download and keeping the reinvestment with shares purchase in my retirement accounts?

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Comments

Jon

I just exclude my retirement accounts from most of my reports since nothing in them should show up in monthly spending/income.

jacobs

One of the posters only listed the shares reinvested and not the Dividend.

@Leslie Jones I'm not sure what you're saying this user would do. There are two ways you can record a security which pays a dividend that is reinvested: a single Reinvest Dividend transaction, or two transactions to first record a Dividend paid in cash followed by a Buy transaction to use the cash to purchase the additional shares. Both accomplish the same thing in your portfolio, and show up identically in reports. There's no advantage to two separate transactions instead of the single Reinvest Dividend transaction, unless that happens to be the way your brokerage company downloads transactions to Quicken. (That is, for the purpose of an income report, Quicken shows a Reinvested Dividend the same as a cash Dividend.)

And you do want to track those reinvested dividends both to keep your holdings and cash accurate and to track the performance of the security over time.

Quicken Mac makes it pretty easy to include or exclude income in retirement accounts from reports and dashboards. Some users may want to see that income; for a retired person, it may be their only or primary source of income; some users may want to not see that income for budget purposes. As @Jon said, you can simply omit retirement accounts from and reports where you don't want to see retirement income. Is there a reason that doesn't work for you?

Jon

@jacobs When they said one transaction I assumed they meant an Add Shares transaction, which if I'm not mistaken would update the number of shares without showing it as any kind of income.

jacobs

@Jon You're right; an Add Shares transaction would increase the number of shares to make the balance correct. I just don't see a reason to do that; it's no less work than entering a Reinvest Dividend transaction — and it deprives you of any performance metrics on the security. (If one wanted to only know their holding balances, they could switch to Simple Tracking for the retirement accounts and not have transactions recorded at all.)

Leslie Jones

@ Jacobs I will try to exclude the retirement accounts and only include the non-retirement accounts. As I thought about it more last night I realized that other than my RMD income I don't need to list them at all. Thanks.