Quicken does not recognize USAA money market as cash balance in IRA

Dustin Creighton Davis
Dustin Creighton Davis Member ✭✭
edited January 2019 in Investing (Windows)
Quicken Premier for Windows 2018.  USAA uses a money market fund as a holding account for my cash.  Whenever I sell a security, USAA deposits the proceeds into a money market.  Quicken recognizes the money market as a security so my cash balance is always wrong.  What should I do to fix this problem?

Comments

  • Jim_Harman
    Jim_Harman SuperUser ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited January 2019
    Basically your cash balance in Quicken is zero and all the cash ends up in the money market "Sweep account", right? That's the way many financial institutions handle the cash in an account.

    One way to deal with this is to recognize that the money market balance is your cash balance.

    Another way would be to initially enter a Sell in Quicken for the balance of the money market fund and then delete rather than accepting all future downloaded Buy and Sell transactions on the money market fund. You would also need to ignore the message that appears after accepting or deleting transactions that complains that the money market balance is wrong.
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  • q_lurker
    q_lurker SuperUser ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited January 2019
    The problem is in the semantics.  Cash Balance in the transactions list for the investment account is cash in the more strict sense of of the word.  In that strict sense, the MM holding is a security, not cash.

    However, if you look at the Asset Class for the MM security, you should find (or you can set) it to be Cash.  Various portfolio views and investment reports (but not the transactions list) will group that type of cash with the 'real' (strict sense) cash to show you the aggregate.  That is then treating the MM as 'Cash' in a looser sense of the word.

    As Jim advised (and others have as well in the past to this type of question), you can eliminate or avoid the MM security and use the Cash Balance as that holding.  Your option.