There are many different features that lead someone to prefer one financial institution over another. I came up with a number of relatively minor features that I personally place some value in. Haven't found a single perfect institution though. YMMV.
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individual 401(k):
free, Roth option, in-service distributions, investment options (full brokerage or house funds). See
The College Investor for other features and major providers. Some brokerages provide Roth options; Fidelity and Schwab do not. Vanguard and T. Rowe Price do provide a Roth option, but limit investments to house funds.
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Retail HSA account (not through employer):
free, no min cash balance required to invest. Fidelity is the only brokerage I know of that offers HSA accounts directly. Lively (an HSA provider) gives you a brokerage window to TD Ameritrade. See
The HSA Report Card for detailed analyses of HSA providers.
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Cash management (bank) services:
bill pay, checking, good interest (relatively speaking), ATM access. Vanguard has high interest and
checking, but no bill pay or ATM card. At Vanguard and Fidelity, if your core account does not have enough cash to cover a check, they can automatically draw from another (higher yielding) MMF. Many brokerages other than Vanguard provide bill pay and ATM access with surcharge rebates. These features are not so important if you employ a regular bank account.
Schwab's ATM card charges no foreign (international) transaction fee; Fidelity's sometimes charges a 1% fee. Others tend to charge at least this much and may limit surcharge rebates to US ATMs.
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Fractional share purchases of stocks/ETFs (e.g. $100 exactly of MINT). This is something Schwab promised. AFAIK
only Fidelity has delivered. (Robinhood rolled out fractional shares earlier this month but it doesn't support limit orders.) Fractional shares is the only "yet to use" feature on my list. It should make buying ETFs easier - more like mutual funds.
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Donor advised funds:
low min to open, low grant min, low maintenance cost, low cost funds, wide variety of funds. T. Rowe Price seems to have the lowest "all in" (admin + fund expenses) cost for actively managed funds, but not lowest if using index funds. Fidelity and Schwab have the lowest mins and are low cost. Fidelity has a small advantage on fund costs and variety of funds. Not that one needs many funds for this type of account. It's convenient if the DAF account is with your brokerage as that makes contributing easier.
This
list of 74 DAFs is about a decade old, but still gives a good sense of costs and what's out there.
