Tracking Internal Rate of Return with Quicken or MS Money

[Dude]

Howdy,
My wife and I have 3 Roth IRA accounts at Vanguard and a 401k at Fidelity.* Our Internal Rate of Return (a.k.a. Personal Rate of Return) from 12/31/2004 to 12/31/2005 for each account as calculated by Vanguard and Fidelity web sites were as follows:
Roth 1 = 7.7%
Roth 2 = 8.1%
Roth 3 = 8.8%
401k = 10.0%

What I would like to do, in an ideal world, is to download our transaction history for each account (from the Vanguard and Fidelity web sites) into a software package, and then combine all four accounts into one "retirement" portfolio for which I can compute the overall Internal Rate of Return.

Fidelity says it can download to Microsoft Money Deluxe 2003 (or newer version) or Quicken 2002 Deluxe (or newer version).* Vanguard says I need Quicken 2003 (or newer version) or Money 2003 (or newer version).

My question:* does anyone on this board have experience doing something similar, if so does it work properly or is it more hassle than it's worth?* What works better, MS Money or Quicken?* Which package has better tools to help you understand your asset allocation?* I'm trying to decide which package to buy or if there's something better.

Thanks.

[Dude]

Anybody know if the NAIC (BetterInvesting) Portfolio Record Keeper software will do this easily and accurately?

[LOL!]

I've used Quicken years ago and MS Money 2002 nowadays. I just enter the transactions into MS Money by hand. There are so few transactions that it's not worth the headache to download. That said, I download my checking account transactions into MSMoney. Once setup, it's pretty trivial.

So to answer your questions: Yes, I do something similar. It might be more hassle than it is worth. Both MS Money and Quicken work about the same in my outdated experience.

MS Money does not do a good job helping one to understand your asset allocation. The Vanguard web site does the best job I have seen ... if you enter all your non-Vanguard assets there. Another possibility is to use Morningstar X-ray analysis, but that is not as good as the Vanguard site IMHO.