Sub-Accounts for Retirement

Cyrano

I have a 401k through Fidelity that contains accounts for both my previous employer and my current employer. (My previous employer account has a better fee structure, so I am letting it ride…) My new employer also allows a BrokerageLink option, which has both a Traditional and Roth offering. So, functionally, my single 401k account has four (4) "sub-accounts" that are individually tracked within Fidelity - Employer A, Employer B "Normal", Employer B "Brokerage Link Traditional", and Employer B "Brokerage Link Roth" - but are all rolled into a single "final answer" for reporting, statements, etc.

I have been manually checking all four Fidelity sub-account registers and making sure that I have all deposits and investments and reinvestments and brokerage fees (and, and, and…) properly captured in my single Quicken account, but it is easy to overlook individual line items in the single combined Quicken register - and therefore either to miss something or to enter it twice. (Then the reconciliation investigation starts…)

It would be really handy to be able to create four individual "sub-registers" or "sub-accounts" within the single 401k Quicken account in order to align with the four individual screens that I have to walk through on the Fidelity site. From what I can tell, this is not currently an offering within Quicken. Am I missing something simple? Or is this indeed a missing capability?

I am using Quicken Classic Deluxe, Version 8.3.3, on MacOS 15.6.1

volvogirl

What do you mean "….. are all rolled into a single "final answer"…? You get 1 statement from Fidelity? Those should actually be 4 separate Quicken Accounts or maybe 3. The ROTH definity should be a separate account. Employer A & B should probably be separate accounts. 

Cyrano

Yes - I get one statement from Fidelity.

Within the Fidelity site (which is really the impetus for my question) my "home screen" shows a single total - for simplicity, let's say a total of $100,000. Under that single total, it shows (let's say) Employer A = $50,000 and Employer B = $50,000. Each of those has their own register - but they are "rolled up" into a single total. At this point, I am able to deal with it easily - because the subtotals are also shown, and I do indeed have two Quicken accounts (one for each), and I can "at a glance" check the balances in the Quicken Sidebar against those on the Fidelity site. If that was the extent of the issue, I would have (and have for years) remained silent and not bothered the group.

The complication really shows up with the "BrokerageLink" accounts. At the Fidelity "home screen", all that is displayed is the total Employer B balance; it is acknowledged that the BrokerageLink accounts exist, but no balances are provided. (This balance matches my "at a glance" check with the Quicken Sidebar.) If I look at the transaction details for that Employer B account, however, it only shows the transactions within the "Normal" account - no information about the BrokerageLink accounts is provided.

To get to the BrokerageLink information, I have to go deeper into the Fidelity system. Once I get there, I can see ALL of the individual account information for all four sub-accounts - and they are obviously treated as sub-accounts, since they still roll into a single total. From there, I can see (for example) Employer A = $50,000, Employer B "Normal" = $25,000, Employer B "Brokerage Link Traditional" = $10,000, and Employer B "Brokerage Link Roth" = $15,000 - but there is nothing that totals up to the "Employer B" total of $50,000. From this portion of the site, I can see the BrokerageLink transactions that were not available from the "home" level of the site - but they are separate from the Employer B "Normal" transactions.

Fidelity is very clearly treating them as four individual "sub-accounts" that are then rolled into a single answer. Well, technically, I suppose they are treating them as two individual "sub-accounts", one of which actually has three "sub-sub-accounts"… 🤔

While I probably could set up four individual Quicken accounts to capture the details, that does not jibe with how I interact with the Fidelity site - hence my question. My payroll contributions are a single transaction into the Employer B account - which is then distributed through the three Employer B "sub-accounts".

I know that I could set up four Quicken accounts as a work-around and then do a bunch of transfers between those accounts - but being able to structure the "sub-accounts" to match what I actually see on the investment site would be really handy…

skeleton567

I really recommend that you keep all of your various investment/retirement accounts separated by source. I just checked and I have twenty-six separate investment accounts in Quicken not including three 529 plans for grandchildren. These include 52 years of investment data. Most of these accounts are not active, but are great for historical reporting. The benefit of this is that I can easily report on a single account or see them all in a single report. I can see my entire history over a career of investing while with differing employers, or focus on any single or combined group. I can still report on investment holdings by name or type, etc accoss all acconts for performance also. My wife and I currently have five separate active investment/retirement accounts with Fidelity and two 'cash management accounts'. It is good that they are all with one FA since we can discuss our complete plan with one provider while having differing focuses in the unique accounts. We each have IRA accounts, each have accounts with funds from real estate investment, and an account from an inheritance. One regret I have is that for another inheritance I did not keep a separate account but mingled the funds into other accounts.

jacobs

Quicken Mac doesn't have any concept of "sub-accounts". As originally designed, an account in Quicken was intended to mirror an account in the real world. That works fine for most people with most accounts, but what you describe with a single 401k account at Fidelity that looks like multiple accounts has no equivalent in Quicken. I think you'll have to decide to track it in Quicken as a single account or split out transactions into four separate accounts, even though neither solution is optimal.

This is going to become a much bigger problem starting later this year because a lot of people will have 401k catch-up contributions which will be denoted by brokerages as Roth contributions without being deposited into a separate Roth 401k account — Roth and non-Roth funds commingled in a single account. I don't know how people will track pre- and post-tax contributions and earnings on those contributions accurately in Quicken.

Jon

If someone is working & not withdrawing money from their retirement savings, is it really necessary to separate out Roth vs non-Roth 401K money in Quicken? All you're doing pre-retirement is tracking investment performance and net worth, and you can do both of those without having to deal with how the money will be taxed when it's eventually withdrawn. If Quicken Mac eventually adds a retirement planning module, then it would be important to know how much of your retirement savings is taxable, but I don't see what Quicken would do with that information currently.

jacobs

If someone is working & not withdrawing money from their retirement savings, is it really necessary to separate out Roth vs non-Roth 401K money in Quicken?

Sure. You want to know what your pre- and post-tax retirement investments are. You need it for any financial planning/modeling to estimate your future taxes on RMDs in retirement and to see if your savings will last you through your life. You need it if you consider or are doing any Roth conversions. you need it if you're going to use/remove funds from your retirement account.

Jon

You need it for any financial planning/modeling to estimate your future taxes on RMDs in retirement and to see if your savings will last you through your life. You need it if you consider or are doing any Roth conversions.

But it doesn't seem necessary to me to track the Roth/non-Roth separation within Quicken Mac to do those things since it isn't going to offer any help or advice on those tasks. Track it in a spreadsheet instead, update it once a quarter when you get a statement, and let Quicken Mac show the combined all-in-one statement values.

Once you are retired and start making withdrawals then it's more desirable to have Quicken know what's taxable & what's not to get the tax reports correct. But until then there's nothing Quicken Mac can actually do with that information.

jacobs

@Jon I'm retired, not making retirement withdrawals, but have been making Roth conversions to empty out my traditional IRAs before my wife and I reach RMD age. That financial planning starts years before starting to make withdrawals. We have separate accounts for each of our traditional IRAs, Roth IRAs and an inherited IRA. But if each of our traditional and Roth IRAs had been commingled in a single retirement account, then I'd be having to use my brokerage statements and not Quicken to do my financial planning. One of the significant values of Quicken to me is being able to see and understand my current and past financial status without needing to log onto multiple financial institution websites to piece our assets together, or to build/maintain separate tracking spreadsheets. So I disagree that it doesn't matter if Quicken can differentiate between pre- and post-tax investments. (Precision in Quicken tax reports is actually less important to me, because I'll use the numbers on 1099s, not Quicken tax reports, when it's time to file my taxes.)

Jon

But if each of our traditional and Roth IRAs had been commingled in a single retirement account, then I'd be having to use my brokerage statements and not Quicken to do my financial planning.

Yes, exactly. That's the boat OP is in.

I'm not suggesting that Quicken shouldn't be able to handle commingled Roth & non-Roth accounts, I'd vote for that Product Idea if it came up. But right now it doesn't, and for someone like OP who is still working & in the accumulation phase of retirement planning it just doesn't seem to me to be worth trying to make Quicken do it - it's too much extra work for too little result. Once a person retires & stops making contributions every paycheck it becomes a lot less work to manually manage those accounts, and you start looking at those accounts differently. You start doing things like Roth conversions that you probably wouldn't want to do while you're still earning a salary, and at that point it might be worth breaking the commingled funds out into separate manually managed accounts in Quicken.

I faced a similar dilemma with my 401K while working; I didn't have a Roth but I did have some commingled after-tax funds due to hitting the contribution limit near the end of the year. I couldn't connect Quicken to download transactions for my 401K so I managed the Quicken account manually, and that would have meant most paychecks I'd be entering 8 transactions by hand (when I hit the contribution limit it would go up to 12). I just didn't see any reason to go to all that trouble every other week. After retiring I rolled the 401K funds over to traditional & Roth IRAs so the commingled funds problem went away, but if I had left the funds in the 401K I would have considered splitting off the after-tax funds into their own account.

jacobs

You start doing things like Roth conversions that you probably wouldn't want to do while you're still earning a salary

FWIW, I started Roth conversions while my wife and I were still working, but the amounts were relatively modest to avoid jumping into a higher tax bracket. After retiring, working with a financial planner, is when we developed our plan for accelerated Roth conversions.

After retiring I rolled the 401K funds over to traditional & Roth IRAs so the commingled funds problem went away

@Jon Because comingled pre- and post-tax funds in a single account wasn't anything I had previously thought about, I'm curious about a few things, since I know this will come up more this year. Were your post-tax contributions invested in separate securities from the pre-tax ones? Was your brokerage company able to calculate and split the funds into two separate traditional and Roth accounts, or did you have to calculate it manually? I guess in your case, the earnings (reinvested dividends, capital gains) are all taxable when you withdraw from the account, right? Your post-tax contributions are tax-free when withdrawn, but the gains on that money is still taxable when withdrawn, right? So to track this in Quicken, or externally, all you needed to do was tag or track the amount of your post-tax contributions.

What's different for the OP here is that now there are comingled funds in a 401k where some of the money is designated as Roth (as is now required in 2026 for catch-up contributions) — and unlike your situation, the income earned on those Roth contributions is tax-free when withdrawn. From my limited reading on this, IRS requires the financial institution to track money by source — e.g. regular versus Roth contributions — and also track earnings attributable to regular versus Roth contributions so that earnings on the Roth contributions remain tax-free upon withdrawal.

So if in 2026 I had an employee contribution of $1,000 in XYZ Fund, an employer contribution of $300 in XYZ Fund, and a catch-up Roth contribution of $500 in the XYZ fund, the brokerage has to forever track the earnings on the $1,300 in pre-tax investments separate from the $500 in post-tax investments. Let's say that over 10 years, XYZ fund pays a total of 50% dividends on the original $1,800 investment, so it has grown to $2,700. If I now retire and want to roll my 401k into IRA accounts, the brokerage would need to have the calculation that what I will roll into my IRA account is $1,950 ($1,000 + $300 x 50% growth) in pre-tax money, and $750 ($500 x 50% growth) will roll into a Roth IRA account as post-tax money. The earnings on the Roth contributed funds has accrued tax-free. It's a little confusing but understandable in this simplified example, but imagine the complexity when contributions are being made for 26 bi-weekly paychecks each year, and investments are spread among 10 different ETFs in the account! I guess (hope) financial institutions have updated their software to track these buckets of funds correctly, but I think it would be difficult for an individual to do in a spreadsheet or in Quicken.

So going back to @Cyrano's original post, I understand why the concept of "sub-accounts" would be useful for this purpose, but I wonder if the Quicken developers have even wrestled with how they could create some way to track this.

Jon

Were your post-tax contributions invested in separate securities from the pre-tax ones?

No, everything got invested the same, there was no way to make separate investment choices for pre-tax and after-tax money. It might have been different if I had opted to make Roth contributions but I never looked into how exactly that worked since Roth wasn't even an option until a few years before I retired.

Was your brokerage company able to calculate and split the funds into two separate traditional and Roth accounts, or did you have to calculate it manually?

The list of transactions showed each individual fund purchase and those were broken out by both fund and by money type - my pre-tax contributions, company matching pre-tax contributions, and my after-tax contributions (if any). The quarterly statements showed how much of the total account value was after-tax money but did not further break it down by investment so I would have had to figure that part out myself.

When I eventually rolled everything over into IRAs the account manager figured out the amounts going to traditional & Roth, I didn't have to do that for them.

I guess in your case, the earnings (reinvested dividends, capital gains) are all taxable when you withdraw from the account, right? Your post-tax contributions are tax-free when withdrawn, but the gains on that money is still taxable when withdrawn, right? So to track this in Quicken, or externally, all you needed to do was tag or track the amount of your post-tax contributions.

That all sounds correct.