Vanguard being difficult

[Bflotomny]

I’m a small player when it comes to investing, I’ve been Vanguard since I retired 5 years ago. I’m finding that VG is getting more difficult to deal with. My biggest complaint is the high percentage of funds that are closed. Lately most funds I have an interest in are closed.
Additionally I spoke with their phone staff about a transaction on line; I could have been on Mars and he was on Venus. He says look on the bottom left of this page on line and you’ll see X. Except on my computer there is no X on the page.
I’d like to hear from others about Vanguard

 

[REWahoo]

I've had funds at Vanguard since 2005 and have never had any issues with them.

 

[GrayHare]

They have some great representatives and some not so great ones. What you see on a screen is very dependent on browers type, version, and settings.

 

[MRG]

No problems here. Actually I'm much happier with Vanguard than Fidelity.

I do remember that the Vanguard folks use the same UI as you do. Perhaps your screen resolution was off?

 

[USGrant1962]

You may be getting tripped up by the fact that they have "closed" all of their investor class index funds to merge them with Admiral class. This is a good thing as the expense ratios are lower. As far as I know, no index funds are closed.

The only closed Vanguard funds that I am aware of are Capital Opportunity, Morgan Growth, Primecap, Primecap Core, and Dividend Growth. Now, these are some of their best actively managed funds so that is unfortunate, but good for existing investors so they don't get flooded and become index-like. [Full disclosure - I own Primecap and Dividend Growth]. Anyway, that is 5 funds out of 130 that Vanguard offers - not a high percentage.

 

[LOL!]

You may be getting tripped up by the fact that they have "closed" all of their investor class index funds to merge them with Admiral class. This is a good thing as the expense ratios are lower. As far as I know, no index funds are closed.

I agree. Vanguard did not do a great job of letting their clients know about this or perhaps none of their clients read any e-mails from Vanguard anymore nor their newsletter.

Last night, my wife submitted an exchange and got a big pop-up warning about not being able to buy back into the fund she was exchanging out of. It was innocuous because the Admiral fund was now available, but the pop-up message did not make that immediately clear to her, so created confusion.

 

[gwraigty]

I can't address the specific situation you are describing. I can tell you that I don't like Vanguard. We started having difficulty with them when a VBO option became available in my husband's 401k. It became apparent that they didn't know what they were doing outside of their normal 401k/mutual fund arena. Problems that we've had with them since then have convinced us that as soon as my husband no longer works for his employer, the 401k will be rolled over into either Schwab or Fidelity. No problems with either one of them.