As many of you know, I use GnuCash to track my personal finances. GnuCash helps me stay on top of my checking account, my credit card account and my portfolio. That means I also use GnuCash to track my 401(k), such as it can be tracked. There's a bit of mystery in my 401(k), and probably in yours too, at least there is if yours is managed by one of the big mutual fund companies.

My story goes like this: In my transition from Microsoft Money to GnuCash this year I realized I could track not only the investments in my 410(k), but also the cash transactions. I'd never been very successful doing this with Microsoft Money so I thought I'd give it a try. Every paycheck my 401(k) contribution is credited to my GnuCash "cash" account within my GnuCash 401(k) account. Periodically I get a statement showing how my 401(k) cash was used to purchase shares of various funds in my 401(k) account proper. That's where the fun starts.

At that point in time, the purchase date, I have a price and number of shares purchased, the product of which is the cash amount used to purchase those shares. I also have a ticker symbol for the asset/fund. The problem is that ticker symbol doesn't exist outside my 401(k). It, and it's brothers and sisters - the investment choices in my 401(k) plan - are a special class of funds which aren't traded anywhere but in the 401(k) administrator's accounts.

That means I can't use GnuCash, or Microsoft Money or Quicken for that matter, to stay up to date on the value of my 401(k) automatically by downloading stock and mutual fund prices.

This lack of transparency into your own financial picture is just one more reason to roll over your 401(k) into your IRA at the first opportunity.