Estimated income

Reminders are a very useful Quicken feature. For basic info, see this Help page. Skip the section on Online bills.

https://help.quicken.com/display/WIN/Create%2Ba%2Bbill%2C%2Bincome%2C%2Bor%2Btransfer%2Breminder

For investing accounts, you can easily set up reminders for cash transactions. Follow the steps on creating an Income reminder and when you select an investing account, you can select Deposit, Dividend, or Interest. You can set the starting date and interval, the amount, the income type, and the security.

For more complex investing transactions, you can memorize transactions and set up Memorized Transaction Groups, but that is a topic for another discussion.

 my two brokerage accounts are with Fidelity and Vanguard. I called both yesterday, and they walked me through how to view the total interest and dividend payments that will be paid next year. You can view these payments monthly.

Caveat: Those figures are also estimates, based on your current holdings and the dividends and interest they pay. If you make deposits or withdrawals, do any trading, or the securities' dividend payouts change, you would have to adjust the projections to keep them accurate.

The "best" approach to use for estimating income depends on several factors:

• What are you using the estimate for - projecting cash on hand, projecting taxes, or something else?
• How many securities are involved?
• How accurate does the estimate need to be?

I rely mostly on Reminders, which do a good job of of both projecting cash and feeding the Tax Planner, but as I said I only have a few taxable securities to track. Your situation may be different.

Aha. If you are just tracking fixed income securities, then the income will be very predictable.

With 75 bonds, it would sure be nice if Quicken populated each bond's Est. Income box automatically.

Do the bonds all pay on the same schedule, or a limited number of schedules? If so, you could create a dummy income reminder for each schedule with the projected income for that group of securities. When the actual payments come through, you skip the Reminders. That would save you having to create a Reminder for each security, while still having Quicken track the projected income.

Another way to manage investing income that you treat as "spending money" is to have the securities pay their income to the investing account and then transfer a fixed amount each month to your checking account.

@GaryR I would like to know how to view the total interest and dividend payments that will be paid next year for my Fidelity accounts.

@Quicken Kathryn please see my response to the proposed implementation just after yours in the Idea post.

I have a dozen bank accounts set up in Quicken, most with CD's and some just money market. Is there any way to set these accounts up to be able to see the estimated income? I can't go to security view like all my brokerage accounts.

Quicken lets you set the "Account intent" for a bank account to Investing and that will make the account balance available in the portfolio views. But because these accounts cannot hold securities, there is no way to set the estimated income. In the Account Details for a bank account there is a place to enter the interest rate, but unfortunately this does not carry over to the Estimated Income column in the Portfolio views. That would be a nice enhancement. These repurposed bank accounts also behave strangely in the Investment Performance Report.

If you want to see the estimated income in the Portfolio views, you will have to set these accounts up as one or more investing accounts that hold securities corresponding to the CDs and other bank accounts. This will prevent you from downloading transactions and balances for these accounts.