Hi All,

I'm finally adding the next thing to kmymoney. Up until now been just banks and credit cards but now trying to add my wife's 401k.

That being said, I find the investment portion of kmymoney to be incredibly confusing and I hope I'm mistaken with what I'm understanding. Questions:

1. Do you absolutely have to link an account to the investment account?
*Reason I ask - Makes no sense to link when the money never goes into our bank account. The money is automatically deducted from her paycheck, her employer then matches that amount, and the money is invested with a company that is associated with her law firm. For me to have to link them means I'll have to dig through paychecks to figure out how much every paycheck was deducted and then "fake add" it to our bank account (which again makes no sense because we never see the money in our personal account) and then basically 0 that out by transfering it to the 401k investments. Is this really how I'd have to do it?

2. How to add value to the investment account when the stock symbol is non existent or proprietary ?
*As far as I know the mutual funds that we invest in are completely proprietary and controlled by the investment company. All we see are the generic names like "Aggressive Risk Fund" and "World Equity Funds" - these kinds of names. So a live ticker doesn't help here. What I'm hoping to do is every quarter when we get our statement I'll just "add" the value (increase or decrease) that happened during that quarter.

This quarter for instance it shows how much we put in, then how much it's worth total due to the mutual funds per share price going up. My plan was to do the following (it's not perfect so please correct me if I'm doing it horribly wrong):
1. Enter amount bought of mutual fund X
2. At end of quarter when I get my statement if the share price has increase put in a new entry "stock value increase" and put an amount in there (opposite if it has gone down)

This way I can track a trend over time at how it's going.

Looking for advice here. Thanks

1. You do not really need a Brokerage Account for your 401K, but it may be a good idea to have one. The Brokerage account is useful if part of your investments remains in cash, or you sell shares often only to buy new shares later, or you have a lot of dividends that are not reinvested immediately. A 401K account does not have an attached cash account, and it is possible to do without one in KMM as well. 401K accounts typically do not have selling activity (only exchanges) and dividends usually get reinvested immediately, for which a special transaction type exists in KMM. On the other hand, KMM does not allow money to fall from the sky: If you buy shares in an Investment Account without Brokerage Account, you must indicate which account the funds come from. If you do not want to do that, you can use the "Add Shares" transaction. The disadvantage is that you cannot assign an initial value to such shares and they are assumed to have a cost of zero. So, your Account Performance reports will be all wrong. A "cleaner" way of doing this is to use a brokerage account; enter in her checking account her gross salary; use splits to send a part to the 401K brokerage account; and enter the Employer contribution as a deposit to the Brokerage Account; then enter the new shares as Buys. In my 401K, I do not know how much of each fund is payed by my contribution and how much is payed by my employer's contribution anyway. So, it's as if the money for each purchase comes from a pool, the Brokerage Account. I know: exactly what you don't want to do...

2. You can create fake shares, as long as you have a way to track their worth. Your method is fine.