We are moving our checking account to a Fidelity Cash Management Account. On Fidelity’s side it’s a brokerage account with a cash money market (FZFXX in my case) and stocks/investments.
So the balance of the account is the value of the cash and stokes.
For budgeting, I only want to track cash transactions (deposits, bill pay, withdrawls, etc.). I don’t care about the stocks/invesments.
Tiller pulls all of it in together.
Is there anyway to split it or manage it somehow?
The only other alternative I can think of is to open another investment/brokerage account and use it for cash only. But I’d rather not do that.
We also use Fidelity accounts as checking replacements. A brokerage account to hold the cash because its core money market positions pay higher interest than the CMA core position, and a CMA with $0 balance and auto-overdraft from the brokerage for the free ATM access.
We don’t keep investments in these accounts. I don’t know of a way to separate cash from investments on the Tiller side. Although it sounds like you don’t want to do it, I think the solution is to open another Fidelity brokerage account for the investments. It may also be a bit more secure:
The different Fidelity cash options can be a bit confusing. Only the Cash Management Account is FDIC insured (which may or may not be a large concern for you). To implement the strategy @rhowell uses (and which I’ve debated using myself) requires keeping the cash in a money market fund in the brokerage account, which has a higher interest rate but isn’t FDIC insured. That said if money market funds ever fail, then we probably all have a much bigger problem on our hands.
Back to your question, I’m not sure there’s anyway effectively to separate these accounts in the way that Tiller gets the data.
Not sure how this would work with account reconciliation at the end of the month, but you could just record the incoming stocks/investment transactions as a Transfer type which would you could then Hide and remove them from Budgeting and/or other reporting.
I am with Fidelity also - I am just deleting those Redemption/Purchase from Core Account Transactions. Those items just started turning up when Fidelity changed over to Open Banking. I think I saw @heather indicate they were trying to find a way to not have those transactions download, but no solution as of yet.
Our CMA is cash only and we also have a brokerage account that is Cash plus Investments. I have a category called Investment Transactions for the purchase/sale transactions and I “hide” that category from reports so that they aren’t cluttering up the Budget, etc. We keep a small amount of money in the CMA for Venmo/Paypal purchases or any checks that need to be physically mailed, and move money as necessary from the brokerage account to fund those transactions. I’m hoping it limits our exposure if any fraud were to occur.
Any reason to not download them vs. just use a category that is hidden?
What risks do you see with just using the cash + investment account and having all of your cash in it and doing everything out of it? Why the CMA + brokerage vs just brokerage since brokerage has all the CMA features.
As I understand it, the risk of keeping your cash and investments in the same brokerage account is that you’re exposing a lot more money to fraud than if you were to keep the investments in a separate brokerage account. Some cash activities, such as ACH transactions, wires, check-writing, etc., expose your account information and elevate your risk. By how much, I don’t know. So the idea is that you use the cash account (could be a brokerage account or CMA) for those activities and keep the investment account information as concealed as possible and lock the account from transfers: Account Data Security at Fidelity
The only reason we have a CMA is for the ATM fee reimbursement, which the standard Fidelity brokerage account doesn’t have. (@dmetiller made a good point about FDIC insurance, above, if that concerns you.)
We’ve had these Fidelity accounts for a long time. I think originally (and I could be wrong) that the CMA was the only way to get a Debit Card/ATM card. We also had rental property that we wanted to capture the income/expenses separately and used the CMA for that. After we sold the rental property, we kept the CMA account and started using it for the cash transfers/bill payments that could not be put on a credit card. It’s easy to move cash between the brokerage and CMA accounts on the Fidelity website.
Oh, now I see what you are talking about. Like martha, I just delete those “Redemption From Core Account” transactions. I actually set up an AutoCat rule to change them to “REMOVE FROM TRANSACTIONS” in all caps because they will screw up the Account Reconciliation sheet if you use that.
So, at the end of the month I just delete all these transactions and that AutoCat rule helps me find them.
I wrote about this in another post. Fidelity has another type of cash management account called Fidelity Bloom. When you open it, you get two accounts: Save and Spend. The money stored in these accounts is put into the core money market positions paying higher interest (similar to the brokerage). The Spend account has a cashback of 10 cents per transaction, which is better than most credit cards for low-charging purchase. The Save account will give you 10% off your first $300 and a one-time bonus. These accounts don’t have checks. The save account has a debit card but not ATM reimbursements.
My current setup
Bloom Save = Direct Deposit
Bloom Spend = Debit Card Purchases
Cash Management Account = ATM withdrawals, Check Writing, Bill Pay (Auto Overdrafted from Bloom Save).
I prefer not to bring my brokerage into my spending system. I switched from Schwab in August after many years. I’m happy with my setup.
I classify core position transactions as transfers coming in and going out using Autocat. This way, all transactions that are in the core position are offset.