403(b) Management, Employer Matching, and Reports

[ballardian]

So far I love using FM because it’s done everything I’ve wanted it to do (and more to grow into). FM has really helped me get an understanding of not only all my investments but also helped me to learn about investing through my own portfolios which is a great exercise.

The biggest wish list I have right now is in relationship to tracking my 403(b). Ideally what I would love FM to be able to do is report and graph on Total Account, Employee Defeerals, and Employer Matching amounts; all while the investment data all lives in a single Investment in the portfolio. I suspect there are probably workaround ways to make this happen using the Transfer In for the Employer Matching part and setting the OOP to $0 and/or creating two subporfolios for each set of contributions. This would effectively give me full reporting on both sets of money: one portfolio would have a total OOP of $0 and the other would be my paycheck money going in. But honestly, the amount of effort to make those happen both for back data and for future imports is more than the gain I would be getting.

What would be nice is to be able to mark each transaction as employer matching or employee deferral and have the option on how to report on it: Zero OOP, Full OOP, Vesting Schedule, etc. And then have reports and graphs that would echo this information. It would make management/reporting of a 403(b) or 401(k) much more granular and straight forward in FM.

Currently, what I REALLY want to know is how much of my contributions into that portfolio are from my paycheck (what I consider true OOP Cost) vs how much of it was put in by my employer as a match (which I don’t really consider true OOP Cost but I don’t mind it reporting it as such for the moment). I personally like to view my matching as ‘free seed money that has an OOP Cost of $0 since I wouldn’t have the money if it wasn’t in the 403(b) account. I found the ‘Contribution Field’ that I use in a custom report which works great for the total contributions into my 403(b) but what I would like to do is filter or sub-total by Memo field. All my transactions are marked (ER_Match or PRE_TAX) in the memo field as to which category they belong. It would be a great short/middle term solution if I could use the memo field as a filter/sub-total option is all the reports or at least the custom report. I’ve used in the Transaction Report and it works like a charm.

Thanks for all the hard work and great product. I look forward to any help or directions you can send me.

[Mark]

Hi ballardian,

Glad you've enjoyed FM so far. There are no specific menu commands for differentiating these contribution types, but you do have flexibility here. As you mentioned, you can track it in a variety of ways, including separate investments, sub-portfolios, etc. If you'd like to keep both contribution types in a single investment and treat your employer contributions as "free", then you can simply record those purchases at a cost of $0. For example, you can record a buy of 25 shares at a purchase price of $0. Purchases do not have to be made at market value. It would be nicer if you could tag these purchases, so they could be categorized/reported on separately, but this isn't an option today. Tagging via memo is also a nice idea, and probably gives the most flexibility. Thanks for the feedback.

[ballardian]

Thanks for the quick reply. I hadn't thought of setting the cost as 0 for the ERMatches in the same investment so that is something to think about. As for the ability to sort/filter on the memo field in all reports it would be a nice way to have a little more flexibility without having to hard code fields in for things.

Thanks again for a great tool/program!