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"Our service is terrible but we'll charge you $100 to transfer your account."

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  • edited May 7
    Update on account transfer from Vanguard.

    May 1st after market Close, I submitted the request at Schwab.
    On May 2nd, without any alert / notification, Vanguard promptly cancelled my buy order and did not allow me to cancel my sell order. Simultaneously, Vanguard liquidated my sweep account into cash.
    May 3rd Friday AM, my vanguard sell order settled and cash from settlement was added to the account.
    May 3rd Friday, around 10PM, I submitted a transfer request to Fidelity to transfer assets from TD that I consider potentially not permanent assets.
    May 7th (Tuesday) before market open, TD asset transfer complete and assets are in my Fidelity account.

    Vanguard is still sitting on my assets and cash (earning no interest) and no indication of when they would transfer those assets. How do you like the non-profit and customer owned company's service? You would not go to the lowest cost health care service provider, why would you keep touting how Vanguard are the lowest cost brokerage / investment company?
  • @Balubalu Yes, the whole "non-profit" thing is a joke. How many thousands of employees does VG have? Do they all work for free? VG has to offer competing salaries and bennies or they wouldn't have any employees.

    And then all the hard assets they have like buildings, computers, etc., how did they acquire them and how do they maintain/update them? So all this happens and they don't show any "profit" (however one wishes to define that) at the end of the year.

    The American Diabetes Association is also non-profit, yet the CEO makes a really nice salary.

    Non-profits don't have to please their customers. For-profits do -- or they're in trouble, sooner or later.
  • @Low_Tech

    I made a concerted effort several years ago to find out what the CEO et at VG REALLY make.

    Sometimes you can find their published salaries but the key employes get to participate i a sort "profit sharing plan" similar to stock options.There is absolutely no information about that.

    Even Fidelity publishes more information.

    If you chose, you can buy shares of Schwab and go to meetings and tempt to question people about compensation etc.

    VG makes such a point about "our investors own our firm" but it is total fiction because we investors have no information no control etc
  • Did all you complainers not get a survey recently from Vanguard asking you how they could better serve their customers ? Mines in the trash.
  • edited May 7
    "Non-profits don't have to please their customers. For-profits do -- or they're in trouble, sooner or later." That sums up nicely.

    A lot of hospitals and big box healthcare service providers are also non-profit, and boy their price gauging is legendary if the patient does not have insurance. The bigger the non-profit organization, the least likely I am to make a charitable donation to them or have anything to do with them but somehow I had a mental lapse and did not extended my imagination to apply those principles to VG.
  • edited May 8
    VG transferred investments in the account but still sitting on cash. Why? None of the investments pay distributions until December. Please share your experience in transferring assets from VG - whether they transfer the cash on their own or they needed nudging.
  • I put in an order pre-market this morning at Vanguard to transfer cash to Fidelity. By the time I checked Fidelity at 2PM today, the cash was not only there, but was available for withdrawal (not just internal trading).
  • edited May 9
    Recently, AARP did a study of the largest fund families in 1989 and in March 2024.

    Vanguard was at #5 with less than $50B in assets in 1989 and now is #1 with $8T in assets (grew 160 times).
    Currently, in #2 position is ishares + BlackRock at $3T. BlackRock was also #2 in 1989 with $97B.
    Both Fidelity and BlackRock grew from $97B in 1989 to $3T in 2024.

    (Those with AARP membership probably can access that study if you are curious about it.)

    When the #1 firm is 2.6 times the size of the #2 firm and it reached those heights by grossly undercutting competition on price, there is bound to be collateral effects. So, now Vanguard is looking to shed all the smaller clients. I do not know what their end goal is but the transition is bound to be bumpy.

    As part of their transition, they are divesting their small business retirement accounts / plans.

    https://www.ascensus.com/about-us/press-room/news/ascensus-to-acquire-vanguard-individual-401-k-multi-sep-and-simple-ira-plans/

    So, that is a clue for those with small Vanguard fund investment, even if you have a large brokerage account with them. I have owned Vanguard ETFs outside Vanguard because of their service quality and a brokerage platform that is subpar. It will be interesting to see what the post-transition Vanguard will look like.

  • edited May 8
    "Vanguard wants investors to pay more, and at the same time, they’re giving us less. Just as we were learning that fees were on the rise, Vanguard’s technology was frustrating shareholders yet again.
    On May 1 — the same day the new fee schedule was released — several IVA readers told me
    they could not access their holdings data at Vanguard. Oops!"


    Refer to the section titled "Please, Don't Call Us" for related info.
    https://www.independentvanguardadviser.com/digital-first-puts-seniors-second/?ref=the-independent-vanguard-adviser-newsletter
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