Re: Digest for microsoft-money@googlegroups.com - 3 updates in 1 topic

[Mark Fields]

Dick, 

I did enter purchase amount dollars and quantity at let Money calculate the price for many years, switched to amount dollars and price  about 3 months ago

I could never figure out what my quantities did not match the 401Ks records since they go to 6 or 7 decimal places and Money goes to 3 decide places I was thinking that the problem

Anyway I’ll switch back after reading what you wrote

On a few occasions I sold everything on a particular mutual fund to put the proceeds into the associated cash account and but a different fund I would get that error and would then use the add/remove shares to get it right to “sell all”

I always wondered if Richard Pryor (Superman 3) was trimming off some of the fractional shares and building a big pile of money LOL

Thanks for the tip

Mark 

Sent from my iPhone

On Jan 23, 2022, at 11:28 AM, microso...@googlegroups.com wrote:



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• Using Bills Summary (sheduled transactions) for 401Ks - 3 Updates

Using Bills Summary (sheduled transactions) for 401Ks

Mark Fields <mark...@gmail.com>: Jan 22 03:27PM -0500 Dick,   Thanks for the screen shot. This is genius, I'd say it took less time to set up the initial recurring "Bill" than it does to make the individual purchases each week. Now when the buys are recorded in the 401K it will be simple to start the split from the Bill planner and edit the share price.   This will also save some aggravation I've had when accidentally "buying" the same mutual fund twice. It's less troublesome with your method.   Lastly the associated cash account looks cleaner.   You have made my day.   Mark Fields   On Wed, Jan 19, 2022 at 12:40 PM Dick Watson <l...@littlegreengecko.org> wrote:

<lttlg...@gmail.com>: Jan 22 10:54AM -1000 Aloha Mark,   Glad it's going to work for you and that I could help.   One piece of advice: you write “…and edit the share price.” I recommend you edit the *shares* and let Money calculate the *price*. The total number of shares is the one thing you can always reconcile, but only if you track the purchased shares exactly. (Note this is how the plan is going to do it as well. They neither know nor care if you paid something close to $12.346 or $12.345678 per share. But they do know, and will track, you bought exactly 105.234 shares.)   The Money calculated share price will be “close enough” for any sensible use. But the difference between close enough and exact on shares is huge. Especially when it comes time to sell. What happens if Money calculates the shares is you end up with all kinds of fractional shares problems down the road since Money thinks you are owning 1,234.568791234 or some such shares. By using correct shares, the Money share balance will agree that this is really 1,234.569 shares just like the plan records show.   Stay safe out there,   Dick   From: Mark Fields   Sent: Saturday, January 22, 2022 10:27 AM   To: Dick Watson   Cc: Microsoft Money   Subject: Re: Using Bills Summary (sheduled transactions) for 401Ks   Dick,   Thanks for the screen shot. This is genius, I'd say it took less time to set up the initial recurring "Bill" than it does to make the individual purchases each week. Now when the buys are recorded in the 401K it will be simple to start the split from the Bill planner and edit the share price.   This will also save some aggravation I've had when accidentally "buying" the same mutual fund twice. It's less troublesome with your method.   Lastly the associated cash account looks cleaner.   You have made my day.   Mark Fields

Dick Watson <l...@littlegreengecko.org>: Jan 22 01:12PM -0800 I should add: this accumulating Money-calculated fractional shares problem is a leading cause of "negative share balance at some point" headaches when selling shares down the road.

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[Dick Watson]

Interesting. We never had plans, from multiple providers, which showed more than 4 digits. I'm still thinking trying to track by entered quantity and total and calculated price is the least bad way to go.

[Mark Fields]

As a follow up on the practice of using the "bills" method with splits to purchase the 401K shares from the 401K contribution - 

1) Since the transaction was set up last week and today was the first time I made the transaction from the set up register, I checked on how much time it took, and it took only a minute.  In my case I get paid weekly (never had that as a salaried employer, but my company does it that way for salaried and hourly) and to make the purchases of the four funds with the bill summary was quick!  This time included opening each line of the split, entering the shares (the amount for each fund purchased is always the same for the particular share), then line by line then entering the complete transaction. Everything worked perfectly and I let the share purchase price be whatever Money calculated.

 I did print a cheat sheet with the details so I could enter the share price.  The 401K service provider that my company uses happens to be the same one that my wife's company uses.   I notice that the give the :number of shares / Unit to 9 decimal places but money rounds to 6 decimal places. 

[Mark Fields]

I accidentally hit the enter key and the reply has not posted yet, so this may look like a duplicate.

Apologies for this extra message.

As mentioned this was a quick process since the "bill" method for the purchase of the funds from the new money going into the paycheck is super quick, and I entered the shares and the dollar amount purchased, letting Money determine the $ per share.

I do notice Money will round off the number of shares purchased to 6 decimal places, which is plenty precise.

The 401K service provider showns the shares purchased to nine decimal places and when I entered that into Money it calculated to 6ix decimals using conventional rounding.

I did not use the "CTRL-C" method to copy the nine-digits from the web page.  Sometimes in the past I could I would get an error and money would balk at this.  Theres no option similar to EXCEL where a person can "paste as text", which I think would work.  

Am I missing something in how I could properly do this in Money?  

Again, thanks Dick and everyone in this forum I learn a lot from your posts.

Mark

[Dick Watson]

Glad this has simplified your workflow. This all sounds about right to me.

Re. the 9 decimal places: a) interesting. Out of curiosity, what provider? (Back in the past I had experience with Schwab, ING (nee State Street), Fidelity, and Great West (that I remember; there were probably others along the way. Never saw that.), b) you have zero hope of reconciling share balances; the last sell will always be problematic. As you noted previously, Sell All will become your friend.

Re. problems with window-to-window (web page to Money) CTRL+C/V: sometimes when I have that problem and am curious, I paste into Notepad to see what's really on the clipboard. Usually I find that what's confusing Money is a newline somewhere. (E.g.:

123.456

pastes as

123.456

This is, I think, a symptom of copying from an HTML table and exactly how the browser is deciding where to start and stop. Sometimes, you can be more careful exactly where the cursor is from one end of the drag to the other and get around these cases. But, yeah, likely easier to just do the eyeball copy and fat-finger paste. The problem, if you type like I do, is this will introduce errors in 10% or something of the entries. (Mine are usually transpositions e.g., 123.929 entered as 123.299.) These will impact shares reconciliation--which brings us back full circle to the problem above.

Good luck. Sometimes, despite our best OCD "to-the-penny" efforts, some stuff in Money just has to end up "close enough".