My fiance and I recently each opened a Roth IRA with $500 in each at Charles Schwab. We're in the process of buying a house and saving for as large of a downpayment as possible, so we don't want to put more cash in our accounts. Rather I would like to transfer 10-15 shares of SPY that we currently hold in our Schwab brokerage account into each Roth IRA (thus maxing out the $2000 limit.

Schwab tells us that we need to liquidate the stock, deposit the money into the IRA, then repurchase the stock. This would mean paying commissions of $90 which seems a little dumb.. Is there any reason one can't simply deposit equities into the Roth IRA, using their current price as the "dollar value" (for use in calculating the $2000 contributed)?

Thanks for any help, I can think of better uses for $100 :)

Sam