TIAA-CREF

[Tom G]

I know that this has been talked about before, but I am uncertain how to
deal with this issue.

I have an account with TIAA-CREF to which my employer (and only my employer)
adds money.

The funds that TIAA-CREF puts them into do not have fund symbols.

I see that when I try to add an account to my portfolio, I see under
Retirement, 2 TIAA-CREF options, but neither of them seem to work.

I am perfectly happy to enter this data manually, but don't know how to do
that.

 

[Dick Watson]

Create a 401k retirement investment account. Transfer money into it from
your paychecks. This money will wind up in a cash account associated with
the investment account. From that cash account, you can Buy Shares in two
different Investments. 401ks having investments that are not market
valued--hence no symbols--are pretty common. You can create these as Mutual
Funds (with no symbols) and you can value them one of three ways:

1) Microsoft used to recommend buying one share and then just keep changing
its value to match the total of your holding in that investment. This is the
worst possible choice.

2) If TIAA-CREF reports units and unit value for every transaction, you can
use their unite value as a share value. This is the best case but is more
work and many plan trustees do not uniformly report the unit values.

3) You can always use $1 share values and then set the number of shares for
each activity to the dollar value of the transaction. This works best for
many people.

There's A LOT more to 401ks, but this will get you started. Be sure and post
back with additional questions. This is a huge topic and one post can't
begin to address all of the issues and possible scenarios. I've started a
401k tutorial for an unofficial FAQ (http://umpmfaq.info) but there haven't
been enough hours in life yet to get it finished.

 

[Tom G]

Thanks Dick, that was very helpful. My only problem with this method is that
it doesn't allow me to watch the return for each of the different funds.

 

[Dick Watson]

If you get unit values, every time you get a new value entered, the returns
calculated will be correct as of that quote. If you use the $1 shares, when
you get statements, you can do an account update and it will do Add/Remove
shares transactions are required. That will also get you close. Certain
concessions must be made...

 

[Art McClinton]

I have been working with TIAA-CREF since Money 98. I prevously treated
it as a collection of mutual funds which do not have on-line access to
their values. I would on a two week period when my paycheck arrived go
to the TIAA-CREF site and manually enter the per share prices. For the
last year, TIAA-CREF has had the ability to link to Quicken. I had been
downloading the QIF files and importing them into Money 04. This August
this was changed to a QFX file. Note this is a new Quicken format that
is not recognized with Money 05. The file appears to be a modified
version of the OFX file format, so if it is selected and imported into
Money 05. I have however found that it will not input TIAA quarterly
interest. I only have CREF which does not have dividends (they roll
them into price per share), so this process handles CREF correctly.

What is coming in the future - Yodlee on their web site supports
TIAA-CREF correctly, also Moneycentral.msn.com supports adding TIAA-CREF
accounts to mymoney files. At one time TIAA-CREF was listed in the
online list of supported financial institutions, so I expect it is only
a mater of time before TIAA-CREF will be supported by Money 05 using Yodlee.

Hope this helps. If you want further details concerning exactly the
steps I use, please request. My account is first letter lastname at cox
dot net.

Art McClinton

 

[Tom G]

Art:
Thanks for the information about getting the TIAA-CREF off of the MSN site.
It works well. I've tried to get it from there into Money 05, when they
sync - but there's no way to do it.

I was discussing this with someone from technical support at Microsoft, who
coincidently about an open case that I have that was elevated, and we tried
a few ways to get it into Money, but no luck.

Anyway, this is a fairly good work around for now.

Tom