Trustee Troubles

 Maybe "troubles" is the wrong word, but after 11 years, I'm starting to wonder if we did the right thing when we set up my mom's trusts. 

Back in 2015, we put $350,000 in an irrevocable trust, because my mother thought my father had wanted my sister and me to inherit their house, and she got the idea in her head that she "didn't want a nursing home to take all her money." (You can see some of my prior posts about this under the tag "estate planning.") I disagreed this on in many ways, but my biggest worry was my mother's spendthrift tendencies and lack of financial acumen, so I was very happy to have that money taken out of her control for me to invest. We also put most of her remaining money ($110k) in a revocable trust. I have been managing both of these trusts ever since, disbursing some revocable trust money when my mother's income didn't cover her needs, and transferring the dividends from the irrevocable trust to the revocable trust: the terms are that my mom gets the income during her lifetime but can't touch the principal, which goes to my sister and me after her death. At this point, my mom's total assets are about $390k, mostly in the revocable trust other than $5k in her checking account,. The irrevocable trust is worth about $735k. The income it produces for my mom has been as high as $40k per year recently, so combined with the approximately $40k in income she gets from Social Security and my dad's pension, she's not exactly poor. 

So yay me for getting her finances in better shape. But I wish we had balanced the amount of money in the two trusts differently. 

My mom has been showing increasing signs of dementia over the last couple of years, and pretty soon I think we'll be at a point where it's not safe for her to live alone. We've already started to have an aide visit her once a week to help make sure she eats dinner and takes her pills, because otherwise she forgets. (I might get her one of these smart pillbox thingies, but I'm not aware of any devices that put plates of cooked food on the table and encourage elderly people to eat them.) My sister goes over there several other days a week, but my mom really needs a check-in every day, even though she insists that she's totally fine and doesn't need help. But she never wants to go anywhere or do anything and tries to cancel whenever we plan dinners out or medical appointments for her. We even tried to take her on a trip she'd been wanting to do for a long time and at the last minute, she refused to go. She used to be social and was interested in gardening and crafts-- now she just sits and watches TV. (Oh, and her social media use is exactly what's described in this recent New York Magazine article:  No iPad Till After Dinner, Mom.) Her physical health is not too bad, mainly because she's no longer overweight, but she is getting more and more frail and I worry she'll fall, as she lives in a place with stairs. We finally got her to a neurologist and they think she may have Alzheimer's.

Although she is very resistant to the concept, the ideal thing for my mom would be an assisted living facility. She'd get meals and medication management and be able to chat with people and do activities. She'd be safe and have access to help 24/7. But of course it's extremely expensive. This is exactly why I wanted to control her money in the first place, but I think the way we allocated the money between the trusts was not right. We put too much in the irrevocable trust, and now I feel like we could be a bit trapped. My mom's money might cover about 8 years of assisted living. She'd be 90 by then, so maybe that's fine. But that assumes she's in assisted living til she dies. If we had to reserve some money to cover memory care or nursing home care at an even more astronomical cost, she'd maybe have 4 years of assisted living. (You can imagine the big spreadsheet I made to calculate how multiple scenarios might play out!) My mom has a lot of longevity in her genes-- my grandmother also had Alzheimer's and lived into her early 90s, so it's hard to know how many years my mom has left, and what kind of shape she'll be in during those years. To me, the worst thing would be if we got my mom into assisted living and she thrived there, but then we ran out of money and had to move her somewhere else. Ironically, we'd be fine if we had a crisis and needed to put her in a nursing home tomorrow-- her money might last less than 2 years but we'd be able to go in as a private payer and then Medicaid would kick in to help pay nursing home costs. Neither Medicare nor Medicaid will pay room and board costs for assisted living.

If we had split the trust money the opposite way, or even 50/50 between the revocable and irrevocable trusts, I'd probably feel very comfortable right now, knowing we'd be able to afford home care, assisted living and nursing care as each made sense. But as it is, I'm unsure. One place that I looked at for assisted living has a 90% refundable entrance fee of about $125k, and requires people to have about $500k in assets, as it's a non-profit continuing care community where they'll never kick you out. But then the monthly fees would be at least $8,300 for a tiny studio at a level of service that includes a little assistance with meds and being reminded to go to meals and activities, but no help with bathing/grooming/going to the bathroom, which she is fine doing herself for now. We might just try applying to see if my mom's age and condition could make her someone they'd accept with slightly less cash on hand-- these places basically gamble on whether you'll die while you're still able to pay. And maybe I'm over-estimating her potential life span.

In theory, if my mom runs out of money, there might be a way to just cancel the whole irrevocable trust and use the money for her care. Or my sister and I could just help pay for the assisted living, though my sister can't really afford it after putting two not-yet-employed kids through college. The lawyer also said we shouldn't give my mom money as that would affect her Medicaid eligibility. So it's complicated.  I am also very concerned for my sister's mental health, as she is the local one bearing most of the burden of day to day caregiving. Unfortunately, my mom has said a few times that what she really wants to do is move in with her. If my sister's kids manage to get jobs and move out, maybe that will be a possibility but even then, I think that would be really hard. My sister already has a lot on her plate. 

Whatever happens, I keep trying to remind myself that we are way better off than most families who are dealing with aging parents with dementia. We've already done the legal stuff we need (including a health proxy and power of attorney), we have more money than most people do, and now we just have to figure out the best way to keep our mom safe and happy for whatever time she has left. 

Net Worth Update 2025 Year End

 I never did a year end recap of my net worth or expenses, but better late than never! Here's a quickie version:

My net worth as of 12/31/25 was $2,994,337, an increase of $459,534 since the prior year. (As of this writing, my net worth is now up to $3,281,000.)

I'm not making a ton of money these days, but my early efforts to save and invest are paying off, as my net worth keeps growing mainly from the snowball effect of investment gains over the past 25+ years.

My 2025 income was $67,528 in gross salary, plus $3,190 in employer 401k matching funds.

My total expenses including taxes (but not 401k contributions) were $72,912. I don't love the negative cash flow of $2,194 but you can see that it was not very significant in comparison to the growth of my investments. Of course the value of the investments could fall, and sometimes does, but at this point, it could probably go up or down more in a day than I make from working in a whole year. I have to start just accepting that it's okay to spend some of my savings. (And I WAS accepting that back when I wasn't working, but then when I got a job again I was so happy I was covering my expenses that it's now disappointing when I'm not!)

My expenses were pretty consistent year on year with a few exceptions: more gift giving, more charitable giving, and more spent on household and garden stuff. Lower health insurance costs because Sweetie switched from my plan to Medicare towards the end of 2024. We spent more on travel, in part due to a business class upgrade, but Sweetie paid for more of that than I did so my travel expenses actually went down vs. the prior year. 

Looking ahead to the rest of this year, I think most of our expenses will continue to be similar, but our travel budget will take another big jump. It's a little scary to be getting into that phase of life where you have to start scheduling in all the bucket list trips before your body can't handle them anymore. But lie-flat airplane seats help with some of that! And I feel so lucky we are able to afford them now. But psychologically, it's hard to adjust to spending money on something that always seemed like an out-of-reach extravagance-- a topic for another blog post one of these days.

Re-Diversifying My Investments

 I haven't talked much about my investments recently. Over the years, my 401k, Roth IRA and other investments have grown nicely. My strategy has been to pick a variety of mutual funds, mostly, and leave them alone. But I do keep an eye on them and in the last few years I've started to be more conscious of rebalancing my portfolio as I get closer to the age when I'll fully retire and start having to use that money. 

I've been more heavily weighted to stocks than what is traditionally recommended for someone my age, so I've been nudging things towards more conservative investments a bit, but it's been hard to do that in the last few years, when bond funds haven't been doing very well. Meanwhile, stocks have continued to hit new heights, despite some bumps in the road-- that makes them hard to give up. But today I read a very interesting article that made me decide it was time to take more action:

Your "Safe" Stock Funds May Be Riskier Than You Think

The gist of it is that even if you think holding mutual funds means your investments are diversified, you actually probably have a lot of eggs in just a few baskets because of the gains in tech stocks due to AI. I'd been aware that several big tech stocks were becoming a bigger and bigger share of the overall market, but reading this article was the impetus for me to dig deeper into my own portfolio to see how much of it was based on Nvidia, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet/Google, Microsoft and Meta. I dug into every fund I hold and looked at what their top holdings are, totaled up the percentages held in these companies, and then applied that percentage to my total dollar value in each fund. I totaled that up and calculated what percentage it was of my total investments, and found the result a bit scary:

Over half a million dollars, or about 19% of my investments!

To me, at my age (late 50s), it's too much to have riding on these 6 companies, even if they've been doing really well. (I probably should also have added Tesla into my calculations, as it appeared in many of those top holdings lists, as did Broadcomm.) I was also concerned when I read some recent analysis about circular investments among these companies. Bloomberg had an article about it, which seems to be paywalled, but you can see a graphic from the article here, and there's another interesting visualization of the situation here. Some people think there's enough fundamental promise in AI that this will all be fine, or that if things go south, it will hurt smaller startups the most, but it feels a bit too Ponzi-scheme-ish to me. If I was younger, I'd be more inclined to ride it out, but I'd rather play it a little safer.

Most of my exposure is in one big Fidelity fund where I have almost $600k invested. So I decided to just lop some of that off, and move $200k of that into 5 other funds I already hold in smaller amounts, a mix of international stock funds, mid-cap stock funds and bond or blended funds. Even this probably doesn't  rebalance me as much as I need, but it's a start. I'm harvesting some gains now, and maybe I'll miss out on even bigger gains to come, but my gut tells me we could be heading for a time when some of this bubble may burst.

I also can't help thinking of the classic advice to invest in what you know and like. I know Amazon and while they seem pretty world-conquering, I don't like them and don't want to support them any more than I have to. I use Apple products and love them, but I'm worried they are losing their way a bit. I HATE the "liquid glass" redesign. I'm getting really sick of Facebook and Instagram, and more and more of my friends seem to be leaving these platforms-- or else I can never find their posts because they are buried under so many ads. And I have yet to find any instance of AI that I can really embrace-- mostly it seems like an inaccurate annoyance, and where it actually has powerful applications, it will just kill jobs. I've seen AI summaries of meetings I was in, and was impressed at how well it captured most things, but it wasn't good enough for me to not take my own notes, so what's the point? Though I will admit it could have been handy to be able to speak to my computer and say "exchange $200k of my Fidelity Growth fund and reinvest it in $40k of fund X and $40k of fund Y..." etc.

Anyway, that's where my head's at today on a very chilly Sunday! We'll see how it goes.

And as usual, all caveats apply that this is not financial or investment advice, I'm not a finance or investment professional, etc. Just sharing my personal thought process.

"It Just Doesn't Seem Attainable."

 For as long as I've been writing this blog (yikes, I never commemorated its 20th anniversary last month!), I've tried to counter a certain negativity about "making it in New York." New York City has always been a very expensive place to live, and has always had a culture where rich people and their predilections kind of set the scene-- old money, greed-is-good Wall Streeters, all the arts and design and fashion and media people. New York is the subject of so many books and movies and TV shows that some people feel like they aren't living the dream unless it looks like an episode of Sex and the City. It can seem like an expensive lifestyle is just what's normal, so if you can't afford that lifestyle, you might feel like you haven't "made it." Or you're so busy spending money on some aspects of that lifestyle that you can't afford basic things like owning a home or saving for retirement. Some people kind of give up, just deciding that they might as well live paycheck to paycheck and get into debt since they won't be able to attain those long term goals no matter what. 

I've tried to counter that attitude-- my years in NYC were tight financially at the beginning, but I found a balance that allowed me to save money, buy homes and build wealth. I allowed myself some treats, but I also set limitations and adjusted my expectations about what was reasonable and possible. I was willing to make some sacrifices, but not some others. And things ended up working out for me-- I feel like I "made it" in the sense that I had a decent life, and could have continued to have a decent life in NYC if I'd stayed. And my attitude on this blog has always been "you can make it too," at least to some extent. I can't claim that someone making minimum wage is going to be able to buy a home and retire in comfort in NYC, or anywhere else for that matter-- that's a different issue.  My point was always more that all the college-educated middle class professionals needed to stop being crybabies about not being able to make ends meet in NYC.

But I'm not sure I can really say that anymore. 

I recently had dinner with some young women who are living in Brooklyn, not too far from where I lived in the late 1990s, when I was about their age. We talked a lot about how the area had changed and how expensive things are, and I reminisced about the neighborhood during my time there, which was the first time I became a home owner. One of the young women looked at me with a somewhat wistful expression and said "that just doesn't seem like it will ever attainable for me." I wanted to say "no, have faith, you'll start making more and if you just watch your spending, you can do it!" But when I did some math in my head, the comparisons were striking.

That first apartment I bought (with a partner) was about $135,000 in the late '90s, and that same apartment sold in 2019 for about $1,300,000. My partner's and my combined salaries to afford that apartment in the 1990s were maybe $90,000 or so, maybe even less. I think the mortgage and maintenance payments came out to maybe $1,500 a month, maybe a little more, so we were spending maybe 25% of our combined income on owning a home. (You'd think I would know all this for sure, but my record-keeping was different back then, and the spreadsheets I could find didn't mention housing costs for some reason!) The interest rates would have been lower in 2019, but the monthly cost (assuming a 10% down payment, which is what we did in the '90s) would probably have been almost $7500. So you'd need a salary of about $360,000 for that to be 25% of your income. I'm not sure what percentage of New Yorkers earned that much in 2019, but the median income today for NYC for a single person household is about $113k, and for a 2 person household, it's about $145k. 

Even if you take overall inflation into account, and adjust for how the desirability of that neighborhood has changed over the years, there's no question that it is just so much harder to afford to buy a place now. The equivalent of the $90,000-ish we were making might be around $130,000 today. 25% of that would give a budget of about $2700 a month. Depending on the maintenance, that might cover the payments on a $350,000 home. According to Zillow, there are only about 39 2-bedroom homes in that price range on the market in the NYC area right now-- and whoa, one is in Manhattan, right near Central Park! And it's actually only $189,000! But it looks like the walls might be covered with mold, and it needs a gut renovation. And the maintenance is $3500, plus an assessment of almost $1000, so it's actually not in the budget after all. The rest of the 39 possibilities are all in the furthest out neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx, and even then, they're often over budget when you see the maintenance costs. The pickings are slim for anything that might be affordable, and the commute would be a lot longer. I don't mean to sound snobby about the idea of living outside the most desirable areas of Manhattan and Brooklyn-- there are lots of great neighborhoods around the five boroughs that are safe, close to public transit, full of amazing restaurants and parks and interesting sights. But ALL the neighborhoods are expensive now, with affordability being limited to a smaller and smaller set of high-income people. 

The young women in this story are currently paying $4500 in rent for a very small 2-bedroom apartment. One is making somewhere over $100k working for a tech company, and the other is a grad student. Their neighborhood is great-- Brownstone Brooklyn charm with shops and restaurants galore. (In my day, the brownstones there had the potential to be charming but were mostly grungy, and there was one "nice" restaurant and maybe a fried chicken place on their block, while the neighborhood I lived in nearby was already more gentrified.) The average rent for a 2-bedroom in that neighborhood is about $6000 so their apartment seems like kind of a bargain. They are splitting the rent unequally given their different financial circumstances at the moment-- a generous move on the part of the tech worker, but they are old friends and she knows the value of having a roommate you can trust. The tech worker also has access to some money from her family, but happily, she seems quite focused on saving that for later and living within her means now. The grad student's family is less well-off, but I don't know more than that. I'm not sure what the salary prospects will be in her field but it at least seems like something that won't be replaced by AI.

Whatever happens, I'm sure these young women will be fine. They will have a roof over their heads and they won't starve. They've benefited from stable childhoods and good educational opportunities and have had advantages some people can only dream of, even more so than I had. People like them (and me) have always been part of the gentrification that makes cities get more expensive in the first place, but when I first moved to New York, there was still more diversity in the income levels and employment types of people who could afford to live in the city. Now it seems like all the working class and middle class people have fled, to be replaced by finance bros and homogeneous hordes of young people whose parents are willing to subsidize their life style. (See this very sad New York Magazine article: It Must Be Nice to Be a West Village Girl.) 

Maybe my young friends will stay in New York and maybe they won't. But "making it in NYC" will look very different for them than it did for people my age.

Always Striving to go Above and Beyond...

 ... Above and beyond any previous record set for length of time between posts. It's been more than a year but I'm still here! Keeping my head above water, keeping on trucking, keeping on keeping on, and keeping track of my money.

Whoo boy, how about that stock market? How about this tariff shitshow? How about all the death and destruction and disaster in the world? Where does one even begin?

There is too much to even try to cover so I'll stick to a few brief personal updates.

I continue to work part time. I like feeling productive and getting health coverage, to say nothing of having income, though my salary can seem almost insignificant vs. the affect of my investments on my net worth. But the great thing is that my after-tax take-home pay more than covers all my expenses, not counting a few little extras that Sweetie pays for.

My mom's financial situation has stabilized now that I manage most of her money in trusts. She rents rather than owns a home, so she can't go nuts renovating things. She still wastes some money on things like ordering shoes and clothes and then missing the deadline to return them, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to the crisis we were approaching 10 years ago. Sadly, a lot of the reason she's spending less is just that she's getting old. She doesn't get out much, and she has some health issues. She's also getting forgetful. I'm starting to think about how we'll use her money to maybe hire an aide for her, or at some point maybe move her to some kind of assisted living. If we had more money, I would probably just want to move her to an independent living facility so she'd have more social opportunities and wouldn't have to cook-- Sweetie's mom was in one for a little while, and it would be just what my mom needs, but I'm not sure she's totally comfortable with the idea yet. Also, unfortunately, there aren't great options near where my mom lives, and it is of course breathtakingly expensive. I don't think we could afford the costs for 10-15 years she may have left, which could end up involving the even higher costs of nursing home care. 

This is a really sad and hard calculation to be making-- how am I supposed to know how long she has left? If she died in the next couple of years, I would feel bad that we hadn't splurged on giving her the most comfortable life possible. But if we ran through all her money too fast and she lived much longer, that would be a massive drain on my sister and me. My sister's kids are in college and will probably have big debts when they graduate. I sometimes feel like it's selfish of me to worry about preserving my own resources when I am pretty well off, but I have no kids of my own and don't want to burden my sister's kids if I can't take care of myself in the future.

But aside from my mom's living situation, my more immediate concern lately has been making sure she doesn't fall for scams! She is very gullible in a lot of ways-- she's always clicking spammy ads on Facebook and getting pop-ups that claim her phone has been hacked. Even worse, she recently asked my sister to help her set up Telegram-- when my sister asked why on earth she'd need it, it turned out that she had been exchanging messages with someone pretending to be Bradley Cooper, who suggested they take their conversation to someplace more private. Like so many other seniors who get scammed, my mom really struggled to believe it was not Bradley Cooper she was chatting with semi-flirtatiously. I'm not sure if she just keeps forgetting everything we've told her about how these scams work, or if she just wanted to believe it was really him because he's cute and she's lonely. She didn't send him any money but I could see her easily falling into giving out details that could lead to identity theft or who knows what else. We may get to the point where we have to get her one of those stripped down phones, but in the meantime, I don't want to cut her off from her Facebook connections to her family and friends. So I set myself up to get copied on all her security alerts for Facebook, Gmail, etc, and got myself logged into her Facebook account on my own computer. I check it daily to block all the fake Bradley Cooper profiles that try to message her. She had even given "Brad" her email address but I think I've managed to send his messages to spam before she's seen any of them. It feels a little sneaky but Meta obviously has zero interest in doing anything to protect people from these scams, which are rampant. There's plenty of focus on protecting kids online, but no one seems to have any solutions for elderly adults who enjoy the internet but may be losing the ability to make wise judgments about how to use it.

What other quickies can I give you? Sweetie and I had combined non-tax expenses last year of about $105k, which included some fun travel. Our budget has been pretty consistent, and we're allowing for increasing our travel budget over the next few years while still staying comfortably on track with our retirement projections-- though the last few months make it seem like you can't count on anything anymore. My net worth got slightly over $2.7 million at one point, though it's now at about $2.65 million after having dropped below $2.4 million a couple of months ago. I have a list of lots of other money-related topics I've been musing about but will save them for another day, hopefully less than a year from now.

As always, it is heart-warming to see comments and know that there are still some loyal readers who keep tabs on this site. Sorry I don't have more regular updates for you, but I hope you are all doing well and making the best of your own financial and family issues. Thank you for sticking with me.

The FIRE is Still Burning

Reading the retirement issue of the New York Times Magazine this weekend reminded me that I still have things to say on these topics, despite the lack of posting! The "FIRE" acronym has been around for years, but now, beyond just "Financial Independence Retire Early," there are subgroups like Fat-FIRE for people who retire early and have luxurious lifestyles, and Lean-FIRE for people who are managing their early retirement by being extremely frugal. Coast-FIRE means you save a lot early on so you can kick back later. Barista-FIRE means you are sort of retired but working part time in some sort of job to get health insurance.

Now I feel like I'm at the supermarket looking at all the different types of yogurt. I guess it wouldn't be America if we didn't figure out a way to expand every concept into a million different flavors!

I guess my FIRE flavor is a bit of a smorgasbord. I'm probably least aligned with the Lean people. While I have always valued fragility and spent many years trying to live well below my means, I've never felt really hard core about that approach, as I allowed myself plenty of little splurges. Coast sounds a lot like me: I wouldn't be in my current financial position if I hadn't saved big chunks of my earnings starting in my 20s and 30s. Barista doesn't seem like quite the right word for my current work status, but I do feel like I'm off the career track, working rather lightly so I can feel productive and get benefits. 

How about Fat? I've never felt particularly fat. But now there's that pandemic and perimenopausal weight gain that has forced me to buy more new clothes than usual in the last few years. I'm NOT enjoying THAT kind of fat. But I'm feeling a little chubby in the other way too, in terms of living well. In the last couple of years, I've felt secure enough to start spending more money. Some of those new clothes were at price ranges I never would have even imagined before. If I told my 35-year old self I'd someday spend $350 on a scarf, she'd have been horrified. But I did, and it's a gorgeous and unique scarf that goes with everything and elevates any outfit and I wear it a lot and feel like it's worth every penny for how happy it makes me. Maybe it even makes me look thinner??? 

And Sweetie and I have decided that when we do our next big trip, hopefully to Asia sometime next year, we're going to stop torturing our bodies and fly business class. We're also going to upgrade one of our cars sometime soon-- not to a Maserati or anything, but something with more comfortable, power-adjustable seats for both driver and passenger. It's shocking how hard it is to find a sub-compact SUV with a power-adjustable passenger seat-- many brands just don't offer it, even in the top-level models. So it looks like an Audi, BMW, Lexus or Volvo is in our future, for probably somewhere between $40,000-50,000. This feels so splurgy to me, but then I found out that my sister and her husband have two new (bigger) cars that have each cost more than that, all while they have two kids in college who will be graduating with some big debts, it sounds like. Auntie X will try to reserve some funds to help the kiddos out, of course, but I'm prioritizing my spinal health for the moment! Being able to do this feels like true luxury to me. But I don't think I'll ever quite fit in with the true Fat-FIRE adherents, as they seem to mainly be Silicon Valley entrepreneur types who cash out of a start-up and have more extreme lifestyle goals. (Or else, as one person in the NY Times article points out, they are people who are raising kids in expensive places like San Francisco, and therefore have huge budgets for lifestyles that might seem not that fancy elsewhere.) I still have a lot of Lean moments of watching for what's on sale in the supermarket, using coupons, and picking up coins whenever I spot them!

Anyway, that is my little flicker of FIRE for today! I haven't posted in forever but life is good! I continually resolve to dump all my money thoughts in this blog where they belong, so maybe one of these days I'll start posting more again. Thank you to those of you who still stop by and leave comments!

Duplicated Securities in Quicken

When I was working on reporting my net worth to you the other day, I was surprised to see that it was about $3.3 million! I immediately knew I shouldn't get too excited, though. It wasn't the first time I'd had Quicken duplicate the securities in my 401k account, thereby artificially inflating my account value.

It's a very annoying problem to have-- Quicken has a "merge securities" feature that lets you combine the assorted versions of a security that have been downloaded under different names. But sometimes the problem is that you still end up with the wrong number of shares for each security-- usually double what you really have. I did a little online searching for solutions but didn't find much. I tried just deleting one version of a security, but Quicken wouldn't let me do that, since both versions were active. I probably should have just removed all the shares for the duplicate securities, but from what little I did see online, it looked like merging the securities would be the best way to go.

Merging the securities was a little complicated. The securities in Quicken don't all have 5-letter symbols, and even ones that did have those symbols had been downloaded under various names, so my security list was looking rather cluttered. A few others seemed to have changed ticker symbols.(The downside to just letting Quicken add all these transactions automatically is that I don't pay as much attention to what's going on. But my old method of entering them manually was a big drag.)

As I was merging the securities, I noticed that it might be duplicating the number of shares, but I figured I'd just have to adjust that afterwards. Once the security list was cleaned up, I went through my 401k statement to check the true number of shares vs. what was showing in Quicken, and then entered some "remove shares" transactions to correct the balance. And voila, I'm back to being $1.5 million poorer! 

The really annoying thing was that the inflated numbers somehow populated my past years' net worths in Quicken. I'd never really played around with restoring from a backup in this version of Quicken, but I decided to try it and see if I might be able to correct the past years. To make a long story short, I ended up restoring an older backup, having more problems, then going back to the more recent version I'd fixed, then having doubts, then installing a Quicken update, and doing a couple more rounds of adjusting transactions, merging securities, etc. What a mess. At this point, I do have the past years fixed and my current share counts are pretty accurate, but my most recent 401k contribution seems to be missing 3 mutual fund purchases, so something still isn't working right. UGH! I'm going to sit on it for a bit and see what happens when my next contribution goes through and whether my balances and share counts match my next statement.

The main thing that came out of this is that I'm going to be more vigilant about recording my net worth at the end of every year in a separate spreadsheet, and probably on paper somewhere too! Just in case.