Category: finance

So I decided to fix my Merrill accounts in Quicken (see previous post). At first, I tried going through the transactions, to delete the messed up ones, and get it straight that way. It turned out, though, that the download from Merrill had screwed stuff up all the way back to December 2007.

So I decided that I’d restore my Merrill accounts from a Quicken backup file from before I set up the download. Well, it turns out that restoring a Quicken file is an all or nothing proposition. You can’t just restore one account. You can open a backup file in Quicken and *export* one account, though. But then you can’t *import* it into your active file, so that turns out to be pretty useless. So I printed out all the transactions in my active file since that backup, did the restore, then re-entered all the banking and credit card transactions that I’d done since the backup. I’ve also re-entered the two 401(k) statements I’d entered after that backup. So now, after a couple of hours of work, I’m basically back where I started, minus the last four months of Merrill statements, which I’ll have to enter in manually now.

Well, I guess I’ve learned my lesson — Quicken and Merrill Lynch just don’t work together, and probably never will!

I mentioned about a month back that I’d decided to download my Merrill statements into Quicken rather than hand-entering them. I *thought* at the time that it had worked out OK. Well, it kind of did, but I just went in and updated the account for this month’s statement, and I can see clearly where it’s still not doing a lot of stuff right. It doesn’t pull down my direct deposit transactions, so it looks like a bunch of money just shows up in the account from thin air. And it doesn’t seem to understand the transfer of money from cash to the ML bank deposit program, so it just shows a bunch of shares appearing there, again, out of the blue. So, basically, not so good. At the end of the day, it’s got the right balance in the account, but I think that historical graphs and reports are going to be all screwed up, if I try to look back at a particular security.

So, now I need to decide if I want to back out the last six months worth of transactions that I’d downloaded, and enter all the stuff in manually, or just live with it. I’m still obsessive enough that I really don’t like the idea of “just living with it,” but I’m not sure I have the spare time (or the will) to go back and enter all this stuff in. Oh well.

On a related subject, I just noticed that the account balance on one of my credit cards was all screwed up. I think that probably happened during the Quicken 2009 upgrade I did a while ago. I think I’ve fixed it now, but it’s another annoyance from a program that’s been around for years and should be able to handle this stuff without wigging out.

I did my taxes last weekend, so I decided to bring my Merrill Lynch and 401k accounts up to date in Quicken this weekend. I had two quarterly 401k statements and four monthly Merrill statements to enter. Very depressing. Lots of money down the drain over the last several months!

I’ve been manually entering my Merrill statements into Quicken for about a decade now. I tried switching to a download & import scheme about five years ago, I think, but it didn’t work quite right, so I gave up and went back to hand-entering them. Well, I decided today that enough time had passed that it was worth giving it another try, and it worked OK. So, now, I’ve got nearly all of my financial stuff automated. The only think I really need to enter manually now is my 401k statement, since that’s apparently not available in a Quicken-compatible download.

I decided to be Mr. Responsible today, and catch up on all my financial stuff. I entered my last three quarterly 401(k) statements into Quicken, along with my last eight monthly Merrill Lynch statements. It was pretty depressing, seeing how much value has been lost over the last few months. I just have to assume it’ll bounce back before I retire.
I also opened a new CD with NJM Bank. They have pretty good rates, and they’re a pretty stable company. I really don’t know what the best place to put my money is right now, but a 12-month CD is a nice safe place to stash a few bucks, I guess.

I realized this weekend that I’d fallen way behind in entering my Merrill Lynch statements into Quicken. Like, a year and a half behind. Oops. So I’m sitting here now entering them all. Part way through, I realize that I seem to have lost ten cents somewhere. Being the obsessive weirdo that I am, I go back through all my statements, and I find the incorrect entries in November 2004. (It wasn’t one ten-cent error, but two five-cent errors.) I have a sense of deja vu about this, so I search the blog and discover that I’ve done this before.

I’m going to keep an eye on this discussion at Ed Foster’s web site. I’ve been using Quicken for maybe 10 years now, but it may finally be time to switch to something else. It just seems that Intuit is trying to squeeze money out of their customers without providing much in the way of new features from year to year.

Downloading quotes for a preferred stock into Quicken:

“Edit the symbol name in Quicken by removing the space, the P, and the R, and replacing them with a hyphen (-). “

Oh yeah, I would have eventually figured that out on my own. The P and the R! Of course! And here I was thinking I could just type in the ticker symbol as-is, off Quicken’s own friggin’ web site! What was I thinking?