403b rollover to IRA

[ed4588]

Good morning,

My current portfolio structure in FM includes a "tax deferred" subportfolio. Within that subportfolio are several other subportfolios including a 403b account and a simple IRA. Both the 403b and the IRA are in Vanguard funds. The 403b account and the IRA each have distinct Vanguard account numbers.

Within the next few days, I plan to rollover the entire 403b account into my existing Vanguard IRA. The specific fund holdings that I currently have in the 403b will be added to those already in the IRA.

I want to ensure that I'll be able to look back at historical data in FM in a few years and see what I did and when I did it. Also, I'm anticipating that the transaction downloads from Vanguard may require some manual tweaking.

Any advice on how to ensure that my FM record accurately and clearly reflects my planned rollover would be appreciated.

Ed

[Mark]

Hi Ed,

If you just retrieve from Vanguard you will probably see sells out of your 403b, and buys into your IRA. You could leave it like this, or you could manually enter using one of these other methods:

1) Simply move all the investments from your 403b sub-portfolio into your IRA sub-portfolio. Close the empty 403B sub-portfolio. No transactions are recorded.

2) Use the "Transfer Between" wizard to transfer all the shares from one sub-portfolio to the other. This will record transfer out transactions in your 403b investments, and one or more transfer in transactions into your IRA.

#1 is probably the simplest, but you lose the fact that you used to have these investments in a different account. Also, if you have the same security/fund in both accounts you'd end up with 2 investments for the same security/fund. You could merge them if you wanted. #2 is the most accurate for recording what really happened. This is a little more work, and you end up with quite a few transfer transactions, but it tracks what really happened. Just recording the buys/sells is probably as good as #2 since this is a tax-free account anyway.