A Year Into Early Retirement; Still More Questions than Solutions

[OldShooter]

... One thing I would never do is hire a firm that requires me to move my investments to their brokerage rather than advise me how to work into mine (be it Fidelity, Vanguard or Schwab). ...

Be a little careful with this. Agreed one does not want to transfer securities to a firm controlled by the advisor (Bernie Madoff, for example), but it is very common for shops to use Fido or Schwab as custodians. Also another big one, LPL (https://www.lpl.com/),that caters to advisors. If an advisor is using Schwab, for example, they are not going to be willing to manage money at Fido. The custodians provide a lot of consolidated reporting and services to advisors, something the advisor needs.

... Otherwise they can hold you hostage by making it difficult/expensive to transfer back to your preferred brokerage if you want to leave. Empower (Personal Capital) wanted me to do they when I interviewed them. And since they would have a basket of their own (possibly proprietary/undisclosed) securities in my taxable account, they said I would have to liquidate my assets with them, get a check and reinvest somewhere else if I left (I had to pull that info out of them). That would mean a big tax hit if you're with them for a while and try to leave

Yes. A good list of prohibited investments is part of a good Investment Policy Statement. Here's an example from an IPS I helped develop:

******************************************
Prohibited investments are as follows:

• Individual Commodities, Commodity Funds, and Commodity Options
• Hedge Funds and other “alternative” investments except REITs
• Unregistered or restricted stock
• Initial public offerings (must have two year trading history)
• Security Options (Puts and Calls)
• Limited Partnerships except publicly-traded MLPs
• Venture Capital
• Direct Investment in Real Estate
• Annuities
• Illiquid Investments
• Investments that cannot be readily valued
• Investments that cannot be readily transferred between custodians

 

[teej1985]

• Investments that cannot be readily transferred between custodians

This would prevent one from using the Fidelity ZERO FEE funds, which are a decent choice, particularly in IRAs.

 

[OldShooter]

This would prevent one from using the Fidelity ZERO FEE funds, which are a decent choice, particularly in IRAs.

Making choices involves foreclosing options. No surprise there. Your IPS may be different.

 

[BlueberryPie]

At least in an IRA there is no tax event selling FZROX and immediately buying VTI, so it's not so bad, but in a taxable account you may be stuck.

And yes I think it's fine moving from Fidelity to Schwab and vice-versa. I was thinking about whoever Personal Capital/Empower used. They used "advisor only accounts" so if you stopped using them you needed to close the account and move to something else.