Tracking funds in a 401k

[David Reiser]

On Sep 17, 2005, at 11:08 AM, David Hampton wrote:

> On Sat, 2005-09-17 at 09:35 -0400, Bradford R. Bowman wrote:
>
>
>> Ok, this makes the most sense to me. TIAA-CREF has fairly good web
>> access to the account, which may make it easy to at least do monthly
>> updating of the funds.
>>
>
> For what its worth, there's a pending patch to the Finance::Quote
> project on sourceforge.net that will allow it to retrieve TIAA-CREF
> mutual fund prices.  You should be able to apply th patch to your  
> local
> copy of F::Q.  I don't know when the next version of F::Q will be
> released, but hopefully it will be less than the two years it was for
> the last version.
>
> David

It is possible to use the F::Q module that appears as a result of a  
gnucash install and just replace the TIAACREF perl script to get  
daily fund prices for the TIAACREF funds. I'm sure I can find the  
path to the script online if you'd like.

Coupled with OFX downloads and importing into gnucash for each set of  
purchase transactions, it's possible to have gnucash tell you your  
daily retirement fund value with less work than I used to spend doing  
reconciliations once a year manually.

One transaction that still is manual, if it applies to you, is  
accumulation in the annuity account. The traditional TIAA annuity  
pays interest into your account daily, but no explicit transaction is  
recorded. So every once in a while I make sure I'm up to date on  
downloading the fund purchase transactions (your personal and  
matching annuity contributions are still a reported transaction),  
then I subtract the gnucash annuity balance from the TIAA website  
balance from that account, and create a transaction that adds to the  
annuity balance from Income:Retirement annuity gain. I also have an  
account Income:Employer Retirement match, so I have to be careful to  
exclude those accounts when I do normal income analysis.

One really nice feature of the TIAACREF website Quicken downloads  
(OFX files) is that they let you choose how far back to go.  
Eliminating a time period that you know you've downloaded saves  
gnucash the effort of rejecting duplicates. The import engine gets  
slow if you import a lot of transactions you don't need.

If you're entering purchase transactions manually from a TIAA-CREF  
statement, be aware that they hide the purchase fees. (share price) x  
(shares purchased) is supposed to = (contribution amount). In gnucash  
you need to enter the contribution amount and the shares purchased,  
letting gnucash calculate the share price. You'll see that there is a  
small percentage difference between the share price reported on the  
statement and what you actually pay.

another Dave