Vanguards portfolio tester

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Dont waste any time with this for the near future; the function is broken on their web site. They quite helpfully noted that they're aware of it and tech support will get to it sooner or later, but they wont commit to a date to repair it.

You can move money from one fund to another for analysis, but you cant add any new funds or you get a 'page not found on our web site' error and it prevents you from backing up and preserving the numbers you typed in.

I'm beginning to get a little concerned about the quality of vanguards web site. Early last week all my bank transfer information was replicated six times, only one of them still working (#5!), this week a portion of the site stops working, apparently whoever changed whatever didnt test the change, and they appear to be in no hurry to fix it.

 

[TromboneAl]

I'm generally very happy with the Vanguard site, but here are a few bugs and annoyances I've found:

Bugs

You can't use EFT to move more than the regular IRA limit of money into a SEP-IRA account. For example, you can only move $4,500 even though the true limit may be much higher.

When adding a new account there's some step where you need to choose an inappropriate option to get it to work (sorry, don't remember more).

When adding funds to the growth of $10,000 graph, some of the fund names are not in the correct alphabetical order.

Annoyances

When viewing statements, it pops up an undersized window for the PDF viewer (The trick is to maximize this window the instant it appears).

You can't reliably bookmark the log in screen, since it jumps around to different servers.

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

I've had to do some workarounds too.

One that they solved was for the longest time I could move money from my bank into an existing 'account' (aka 'fund') but not into a new one. So I created it saying I would send in a check (and never did), the next day it would let me do the bank transfer.

Their limit of $100k for efts has also resulted in some creative activities. To be fair, thats probably a limitation of the EFT system and not vanguards fault. I'm also probably on 12 homeland security watch lists right now for some of the 'creative' maneuvers. I probably am an exact match for someone funding terrorist activities.

 

[TromboneAl]

You can't use EFT to move more than the regular IRA limit of money into a SEP-IRA

account. For example, you can only move $4,500 even though the true limit may be much higher.

This one has now been fixed.