Cal and Dick, many thanks for the suggestions, which got me thinking
in a fresh way about workarounds. As your posts taken together
suggest, there's no one single "only this way will work" approach.

Instead of trying to kludge the existing trust account, I opted to
create a new second account -- the estate account -- and used an Add
Shares to manually populate it with the securities having a stepped-up
cost basis. This didn't prove as irksome as one might have supposed,
for most of the "buy" transactions were from before the date-of-death
and thus could be consolidated into a single transaction with
stepped-up basis.

Richard
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In microsoft.public.money, Dick Watson wrote:

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I like that one.


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Make copies of the Money file(s) in case you want to undo something.


Do you want to continue the same file before and after death, or
would you be better with a different file for the estate. You could
have a new file, or you could create the estate version from a copy.
You still have to file an income tax return for both the person and
the estate. Whichever way you do it, you could start with the
existing file.
If you are dealing with a broker you can download from, consider
making a new file for the estate.Disable that account for online
access. Create the new account Close the file saying that you do not
want to transfer the content to another program. Set up the new
account for online transfer, and download Then download from he
broker into the new file. Let Money generate a bunch of AddShares
transactions.

The downside of this is that the dates would be recent, and any
sales from the inherited stock are considered long term. Instead of
a date of acquisition, you write a specified word. Maybe before
processing the download, you could change the date on the computer
as you wish. Then change it back after the AddShares are done.

Some other ideas come to mind. They involve generating or modifying
QIF files.

Note that you might find the AsOf setting of the Portfolio to be of
use in generating the list of investments. Suppose you then copied
and pasted that into a spreadsheet. You could potentially generate a
QIF file with some effort and expertise. If you don't have a lot of
positions to deal with, hand entry will probably be easier. You
could just update the prices by hand and get the rest during
download processing.

I'm thinking that the best bet is something like Sell/Buy transactions at
the new cost basis. Since you always have to validate the outputs from Money
anyway, this seems like the best way to get the most useful data going
forward at the least impact in data fidelity now. I'd surely put memo
entries in the transactions that describe this as the step-up transaction or
Money reporting purposes. Others with more knowledge of the situation/tax
law may have better answers.

<raschulmanxx[at]verizon.net> wrote in message
news:l8ofa3he9f9mve69uqacvue9546o90vnp9[at]4ax.com...
- quote -

I've been managing a trust in MS Money 2004 and it recently became an
estate with the death of the trust's originator. Under U.S. estate
law, the cost basis of securities gets stepped up to their respective
values at date of death or six months after date of death.

The problem I'm facing in MS Money is that if I try to change the cost
basis of the securities purchased prior to the date of death that have
already been reconciled -- most of the transactions -- the reconciled
balances for the account get totally clobbered.

What I wish MS had done to handle this situation is allow cost basis
to diverge from purchase price -- i.e., by providing two separate data
fields, with cost basis defaulting to purchase price under normal
circumstances but being modifiable in the case of cost-basis step-up.
(Even better would be a software module that would semi-automate this,
by changing the cost basis for all transactions for a given security
prior to the step-up date, based on the step-up price.)

To get to the point, is there anyway I can use Money 2004 to change
the cost basis without kaboshing the reconciled balances, and if Money
2004 can't do this, is there affordable software that can and also
accurately import Money 2004 data?

Thanks...

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