Illinois Municipal Retirment Fund

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Unknown
Unknown Member
edited October 2018 in Investing (Windows)
I have Quicken 2017 Premium for Windows and I think I realized why I quit using Quicken five years ago when I started working for an local government who mandates that I participate in IMRF, Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund, a defined benefit plan. As an employee I have a pretax payroll deduction that pays a portion of this pension. I also have an after tax voluntary deduction into a long term savings account. What I would like to do is to be able to record my payroll deductions so that I can track my portion of my IMRF contributions as well as my long term savings account. I have been told that this cannot be tracked. I was told that I could set it up as a 401(k) or 529, but why would I do that since the tax consequences are very different than a defined pension plan? It is an asset to me, as I will never lose any of my contributions. If I leave before I am vested, I won't be able to collect the employer contributions. If it cannot be tracked, how am I supposed to reconcile my annual IMRF statement to my W-2 (It is box 12D) and use the Quicken long term planning tools as well as my annual tax planner? I cannot believe that I am the only local government employee or similar who is trying to use Quicken who has a similar situation. Why hasn't an option been set up that is not a 401(k), Keogh, 529 account, etc.? More importantly, when will this be set up? How are others handling this at this time? So, so frustrated. Just trying to be proactive and organized and I have wasted a half of a Saturday.

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  • Unknown
    Unknown Member
    edited March 2017
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    Set up two accounts, one called Pension (tax-deferred IRA account) The other called LTS (is this tax-deferred also?if not, Investment account).
    Set up a payroll reminder with your gross pay and split it into the amounts going into these two accounts. Also track your Fed Tax, State tax etc etc.all from that reminder.

    You must mark it an IRA, because you don't want to track it as a 401k account.
    And that is because of how Quicken handles that type of account.

    I have my company 401k as an IRA forever, and it has never been a problem tracking what goes in there. In the beginning of the year, it will ask you if contributions are for this year or last year. This is an annoyance; but you'll get over it. The answer chosen makes no difference since your account is not really an IRA.
  • Unknown
    Unknown Member
    edited March 2017
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    Thank you for your help. I will try this. The long term savings account is an after tax contribution that pays interest annually and does not allow for withdrawals as with a conventional savings account. Upon retirement I can elect to have it paid out as an annuity or as a lump sum. Hopefully this will be used for a nice vacation when I retire! I am really surprised that Quicken does not have an option to track pensions that individuals contribute to. I did reply to the follow up survey and explained in detail the issue. We'll see what happens.
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