Reviewing this software for purchase

[SLO GUY]

I am a retired portfolio manager and, for many, years used Advent products. Upon retirement, I started using Microsoft Money for my own accounts. It has not been nearly as satisfactory as Advent. I am now looking for a better solution for tracking and analyzing my investments.

I currently use Schwab for all my accounts. I am assuming that there is no problems with downloads from Schwab.

I have a quite a few mortgage backed securities (GNMA's and FNMA's). How does Fund Manager treat the return of principal and especially the monthly reduction in balance remaining? Will I be forced to a lot of hand posting, as I have done in Money?

I also write covered options against individual stocks and ETF's. Are there any problems that I should anticipate with this activity?

Are there any difficulties associated with the above activities in preparing for tax reporting.

Thank you.

[Mark]

Hello SLO GUY,

There is no problem coming from Schwab. The only limitation is that you can only retrieve the last 2 year's worth of transactions. (I'm assuming you're using their retail OFX interface, and not SchwabLink files from their institutional side.) Fund Manager will get your balances correct if you use the New Portfolio Wizard to retrieve "Transactions & Positions" by recording any necessary adjustments at the beginning of this 2 year period. If you want longer than 2 years, you may consider exporting from Money to a QIF file, and then importing that. Please see our Getting Started Tutorial for a discussion of the different ways to get started.

We really don't have any special support for mortgage backed securities. You can track them however you think most appropriate. If there is some special feature you'd like to know more about, please ask. You can use "Return of Capital" distributions if you'd like to reduce your cost basis.

There should be no special problems with covered options. They are treated as their own investment in Fund Manager. You'd have an investment for the underlying stock/ETF, and then another investment for any option you write.

One tax related issue with options is that Fund Manager doesn't differentiate between capital gains on a regular investment and capital gains (income) on options. If you need to have this separated out, you may want to put all your options in a sub-portfolio inside your account.