Update on Merrill Lynch Loan Management Accounts (LMAs)

LMAs are now treated as a Line of Credit Account

In the past, Merrill Lynch Loan Management Accounts (LMAs) were delivered to Quicken as Brokerage accounts. Merrill recently changed to a new connection method (EWC+), which changed the way they provide data to the Quicken application.

The new EWC+ connection now delivers LMAs as Line of Credit accounts. Quicken handles a Line of Credit as a Banking account type, and therefore, the LMA will no longer display as a Brokerage type.

Fixing your balances after this change

A side effect of the LMA now coming in as a Line of Credit is that, after the change, you will end up with two LMAs in your Quicken file:

• the old account in the Investment section;

• the new account in the Banking Section.

You will need to close and hide the old account (or delete if you do not wish to retain the history in the old account). You may also need to move or delete overlapping transactions if they exist. See the instruction below

Clean up after adding a new Merrill LMA

If you are adding the LMA for the first time, no action is required. This assumes you were already tracking the LMA in Quicken as a brokerage.

Adding the new LMA to Quicken

When you connect or migrate your Merrill accounts, you should see your LMA listed along with your other Merril accounts. Choose the Add to Quicken option from the selection below the account name.

Once the account is added, you will see the LMA listed in the Banking section of the Account bar. You may see up to two years of transaction history.

At this point, you will have two LMAs in your Quicken file. Next, we will take care of this.

Note: if you don’t need to retain the transaction history from the old account, because it’s unnecessary, OR because the relevant history is also present in the newly added Line of Credit account, you can simply delete the old account.

Correcting your net worth after adding the new account

To remove the impact of the old account, you should “Mark account as Closed” in Quicken. This will set the account balance to zero, thereby correcting your net worth while preserving your transaction history. In the Windows,

1. Open the account list by selecting Tools > Account List.

2. Find the old LMA on the Account List and click the Edit button to open the Account Settings window.

3. In the Account Settings, click the Display Options tab.

4. Click the Close Account button highlighted by the green arrow. This will set the account balance to 0 and disconnect the account. Your transaction history will remain intact.

5. Click OK.

(Optional) You can also select Hide account name in account bar on this window. But if you’re dealing with overlapping transactions (see below), you may wait to do this later.

Handling overlapping transactions

If you have kept the old account and marked it as closed, and if you have had activity in the LMA over the past two years, then you may have overlapping transactions.

How to deal with this depends on the level of activity in the account, the frequency of historical reporting, and the importance you place on maintaining historical transactions.

1. If you don’t need the historical transactions in the old account. If you don’t need the history, simply delete the old account.

2. If you want to preserve the historical transactions BUT you have had no activity in the LMA over the last 2 years. If you’ve had no activity in the LMA over the last two years, you likely have no overlapping transactions in the new account and no action is required.

3. If you want to preserve the historical transactions AND you have had activity in the LMA over the last 2 years. If you’ve been using the LMA, you’ll likely have overlapping transactions in the new and old accounts. You have a few options.

Instructions

If you want to keep the old transactions as a historical record, but don’t need them in day-to-day reporting, you can check the “Keep This Account Separate” box on the Account Details for the old LMA brokerage account. This will prevent the account from being included in reports by default. However, you can always access the history in the “Separate accounts” section of the account bar or by explicitly including the account in report filters.

If you’d like to maintain a single, continuous record, you can delete the overlapping history from one of the LMAs.

1. Go to the old LMA.

2. For each transaction that overlaps with a transaction in the new account, click the transaction and click the “delete” button (Or right-click and select Delete).

If you have already marked this account as closed, you may need to enter an adjustment transaction to set the balance of the old account back to zero. To do this, just enter a self-transfer transaction to zero out the account balance. For example, if the account balance of the Closed account called “LMA OLD” is $15,000, enter a -$15,000 adjustment by choosing the “[LMA OLD]” account in the category field to bring the balance to zero. (Since an adjustment transaction is transfer it will not display as income or expense in reporting.