Investment Total Cost & Gains: Share your feedback here!

I realized that you don't even need to a serious investor(with multiple buys a month) for the current “total cost basis with manual entries” to become very inaccurate as time goes by. When a casual (or serious) investor receives dividends with auto-reinvestment option enabled, they will see inaccurate data slowly creep in as the average cost basis will change even without the user realizing it.

Interesting… Are you reinvesting your dividends? If so, depending on the amount of dividend received, that cost basis should be off (if not way off)…

If you don’t reinvest your dividends then your cost basis should be the same.

@Bgz Just saw your message. Yes, I reinvest them and it's an IRA so no worries about capital gains. Just pay taxes when and if I take it out. I thought the same thing as you that there ought to be changes in the cost basis, but according to Fidelity they didn't change. So something is rotten in Denmark? On the other hand, maybe Fidelity did download the new cost basis to Simplifi but Simplifi didn't understand. Curiouser and Curiouser. I will do some more digging.

OTOH, help me with this if you can. Fidelity takes any cash and puts it into a Core Account, which is a Gov't Cash Reserves (FDRXX). When I get a "dividend" on that, it is just cash and income and would have to report it on my income tax (in my Brokerage but not IRA account). In Quicken Classic, I get an Income Dividend transaction and my cash amount goes up. Fidelity then buys more shares at $1 of FDRXX. All Quicken shows is Cash and no cost basis. In Simplifi, it actually shows FDRXX and its value and I did have to change the cost basis to the actual cash amount.

My question: Shouldn't this be just Cash with no FDRXX listed as in Quicken Classic? Should we request a change here? In my wife's Schwab IRA, Quicken Classic and Simplifi just calls it cash with no security tied to it.

If I understood you correctly, I believe your cost basis remained the same in Fidelity due to 2 reasons-

1. Fidelity looks at average cost basis and the average of all your FDRXX shares (irrespective of when you purchased it and even with dividends reinvested) will always be $1.

2. On the Simplifi side, it does download number of shares correctly but it shows total cost basis which has to be manually updated. But considering the cost of these shares are always $1 and you have unrealized gains, it might make it seem correct.

The values will be different if you purchased shares at 100 and then at 200 and then back at 75$. That would throw off Simplifi based on manual total cost basis entry. The total basis in above example is $375 (which has to be updated manually) but average cost basis is $125.

I don’t have an answer for the bug you reported and I am glad coach Natalie is looking at it.

I discovered something I didn't know (not shocking). I had a stock split overnight in the Schwab account and it updated the number of shares but the price update lags so it is wrong in Portfolio View although the downloaded balance is right. For some reason the price doesn't get updated but once per day and right now the price per share is double what it really is. I expect it will update later today or tonight and be right.

What I discovered is that I cannot edit the holdings in this account even the cost basis. I suppose because it is locked as Schwab downloads all that? I can edit the holdings in Fidelity and they don't download the cost basis.

I have an investment account that keeps resetting the manually-entered cost basis back to 0. Is there a way to stop Simplifi from doing this?

@WJB Definitely the dividends would be taxable whether or not you reinvest them. But in IRAs, you only pay taxes when you take it out and with Roth IRAs, your interest is tax free after you reach 59.5 yo.

As far as cost basis, it would seem to me if you reinvest $100 dividends, you've added $100 to the cost basis. However, since it is an IRA again it won't matter. I don't know what my brokerage account would do as my dividends in it I take as income and report on my income tax and my investment cost basis never changes unless or until I buy some more.

@DannyB I agree. Fidelity and Schwab and the rest offer a lot of tools that I use when I am trading, etc. I want Quicken or Simplifi just to show the value and my transactions. I think anything more is getting away from Simplifi's mission. Now anything that Simplifi offers should work for everyone or almost everyone, but we cannot have every bell or whistle. Even Quicken Classic doesn't do that.

I would like to know why my total cost basis values in my fidelity account are not populated in my Simplifi dashboard. It would be very time consuming and error prone for me to have to update these manually as they are part of a fund….

it's connected to the bank.

I'm trying to figure out how I would calculate my total cost basis for my Health Equity HSA account that does not provide that info. Would I just add up the total of all my buys of a particular holding ( not including reinvestments) and subtract the total of all my sells of the same holding? If I did that once would simplifi then be able to track that going forward or would I need to update it every time I made a purchase or sell?

I have a Schwab Equity Awards account that imports and updates correctly in Simplifi. However, the cost basis for the stock units in that account are not imported. I cannot manually set the cost basis because it changes too frequently.

Is the non-import of cost basis in these accounts due to an issue on Simplifi's end, or is Schwab not providing sufficient data? As is, the cost basis and "Total gain" information across Simplifi is meaningless without this cost basis information.