Moneydance/Quicken users...how do you deal with investments?

[davester]

I currently use Moneydance for tracking investments, although the same question applies to quicken. Since my wife and I between us have many investment accounts (iras, sep-iras, 401ks, you name it), each of which has a number of securities, our investment tracking would be horrendously complicated if we accounted for every monthly dividend on every security. Unfortunately, when you set up an investment account in quicken or money dance, you really do need to track all of those bits to keep your balances in place. I suppose one possibility is to get everything set up with proper balances and then on a regular basis import statement data from every single account, but that would seem to be an onerous task. I was just realizing that all of this detail is not really necessary. Although it'd be nice to have Moneydance have all of my investment data completely up to snuff all the time, it just is not critical, so I would like to simplify my investment accounts. Perhaps just set them up like bank accounts and change the value every now and then, while not bothering to have money dance know exactly which securities I have in each account. Does anybody do this, or have any advice regarding my conundrum.

Sorry for the rambling post. I've just spent an hour wrestling with the chaos.

[bhaveshp]

I've been downloading transactions from multiple brokerages into Quicken 2007 and earlier for many years. Works great! Every once in a while I may need to update a transaction, but for the most part it is seamless.
Quicken keeps track of all dividends/reinvestments and capital gains

I use the one-step download which downloads all accts at once (except for 2 credit card accts which download via web download). This is not onerous, just need to do it monthly.

Edit to add that my 401k doesn't download, so I don't track it in Quicken.

[mrlynn]

Most of our investments are in mutual funds, which send paper statements monthly (they would, of course, like us to dispense with the paper, but my financial guy says to keep it). I don't see much point in trying to track the funds in a personal-finance account. I just have to file the statements where I can find them.

I think it might be different if I were investing in individual stocks.

/Mr Lynn

[Wailer]

20+ year Quicken user here. I gave up on Quicken for MacOS about 6 years ago and now I use Quicken 2011 through win7 on a VM. Being able to download all transactions like credit card statements, brokerage accounts, etc has been a godsend. I'm not sure if you can do that with the OSX version, but it's very robust on the windows side either with Quick Connect or QIF files.

I can't believe I used to do credit card transactions by hand for the first 10 or so years (yes, I'm that exciting to talk to at dinner parties). Back then I would separate things into discretionary and non-discretionary and call it a day. It didn't give me much granularity, but it was useful to know how much I was spending on needs vs wants. It gets tricky when I would buy higher quality food and booze at the grocery store for entertaining. Even now that I can download transactions and 95% of my purchases are from the same vendors, I try to keep it simple. For instance, I lump water, gas, electricity into the same "utility" category but separate from telephone, cell, internet and satellite; the first one I could never really eliminate and the second one I could easily cut back on if needed. Likewise, Costco, TJs, Kroger and Whole Foods are all the same "grocery" even though I might by a 6-pack of surfboards at Costco. The upshot: Fewer categories is definitely easier but gives you less granularity. It's definitely a balance. Any, I've digressed. Again.

If I didn't have the ability to download and was dealing with several investment accounts, I'd probably manually update them every quarter or monthly at most. I agree that it is a pain with a lot of employer sponsored retirement accounts because many of them, say, take fees in the form of mutual fund shares. Reconciling that can be tedious. Monthly or quarterly (or even annually) is good enough because when you start to look at year-over-year or decade trends, you shouldn't care about what happens day-to-day. You really don't need to worry about tracking in retirement accounts since all that will be taxed as ordinary income. If it's a real PITA, just track the balance each quarter and not the investments inside (but do keep track of your and your employer's contributions). That's more than 80% of the population would do and in the end I don't really care how a mutual fund performed over the last 14 years.

If you are dealing with taxable brokerage accounts, then you definitely need to be diligent about capturing all the data since your gains or losses are based on the cost basis of each lot.

Whatever you do, just make sure you stick with it and it's easy enough to explain to someone else. That's how I figure if my system is too complicated; if I can't explain it to a 10-year old kid, I'm surely going to forget how I did it myself in 6 months!

[Microman]

I use Quicken Essentials for MAC

It handles my Apple Stock fine.

It handles my Work Retirement Account fine.

My Credit Union works with Quicken for Mac seamlessly.

ONly my Lincoln Financial Account doesn't allow to login, and get the value. Need to do that by hand.

2 Checking, 2 Savings, Money Mkt. 2 IRAs, etc, No keeping a check register, and at the end of the year I print out a very nice Tax Breakdown for entering into Turbo Tax.

[davester]

Microman wrote:
2 Checking, 2 Savings, Money Mkt. 2 IRAs, etc, No keeping a check register, and at the end of the year I print out a very nice Tax Breakdown for entering into Turbo Tax.

I had no trouble keeping everything up to date when I had that level of simplicity. However, now after decades of each of us having a variety of jobs and consulting gigs, we have probably 15 or 20 retirement investment accounts (IRAs, 401ks, SEP-IRAs, inherited IRAS, public agency deferred comp plans, etc), each of which has a plethora of securities. Some I could probably merge but others cannot be. I think I'm going to try Wailer's suggestion and only track balances. To do that I guess I can just convert the accounts over to being savings accounts.

[Wailer]

I have a pretty complicated number of accounts too.

About 10 years ago I could already see the mess I was heading for, so I really tried to eliminate, simply and consolidate as much as possible. Then right before I made the jump to Quicken on windows, I closed as many accounts as I could. For instance, I bundled all CDs into 1 account and just had each CD as a separate security ($1 per share) and the interest was essentially a reinvested dividend. That works so much better than a separate account for each CD. I also tried to un-diversify too many ETFs as most index funds already give you plenty of diversity. When I switched, it was really nice starting fresh with fewer accounts, fewer securities, fewer categories and the wisdom to know how to plan for the future.

Fast forward to today and I've still got way too many accounts! Oh well. There are some good legal loopholes in the tax code that allow IRAs conversions (with the option of undoing them) or recharacterization traditional IRA contributions to Roth, etc and I can't resist them, so a lot of my accounts have small balances and many are already closed. At least Quicken 2011 lets me hide the ones I don't want to see. I don't know if this makes sense, but I try to reuse the account after a few years of zero balanced have passed.

I also go back and rename securities that I've sold to start with a "z" so that they are at the bottom of reports. And of course Hide as many of them as you can and go through and delete the download data you don't need anymore such as price history.

Good to hear the Quicken Essentials for the Mac can download from all the same sources. If I ever need to "nuke and pave" my quicken account again, I'll check it out.

[Wailer]

davester wrote:
To do that I guess I can just convert the accounts over to being savings accounts.

I'd consider the accounts as "assets" rather than "savings" accounts. I have to admit, I'm not familiar using the asset account in quicken and how they work. Is there a way to create 1 account that has several assets in it?

Imagine someone were to list cars, furniture, jewelry as separate assets but in one account called "household assets". Apply that concept to your retirement accounts. You could lump all your tax deferred ones (IRA, inherited IRA, Sep-IRA) into one account that has a separate asset for each account. Then you just update the value of the asset at then of the month or quarter. You'd have a second one for Roth IRAs and a 3rd for employee accounts.

[graylocks]

Wailer wrote:

I can't believe I used to do credit card transactions by hand for the first 10 or so years (yes, I'm that exciting to talk to at dinner parties). Back then I would separate things into discretionary and non-discretionary and call it a day. It didn't give me much granularity, but it was useful to know how much I was spending on needs vs wants. It gets tricky when I would buy higher quality food and booze at the grocery store for entertaining. Even now that I can download transactions and 95% of my purchases are from the same vendors, I try to keep it simple. For instance, I lump water, gas, electricity into the same "utility" category but separate from telephone, cell, internet and satellite; the first one I could never really eliminate and the second one I could easily cut back on if needed. Likewise, Costco, TJs, Kroger and Whole Foods are all the same "grocery" even though I might by a 6-pack of surfboards at Costco. The upshot: Fewer categories is definitely easier but gives you less granularity. It's definitely a balance. Any, I've digressed. Again.

you and i would have wonderful dinner conversations! and i also, as i've aged, have opted for a bit less granularity.