Thank you. I will explore that. If you could elaborate on your transfer experience and subsequent interactions that would be helpful. ( I assume you were with Vanguard before and transferred your accounts to Fidelity?)
We were with Merrill Lynch Wealth Management and wanted to transfer to Vanguard. After a month of nightmarish interactions and their inability to set up our VG accounts as trust accounts, we decided to go back to Fidelity, which was where we were with for decades before moving to ML. Unfortunately, my husband's IRA was successfully moved from ML to Vanguard, so we had to do another move for his IRA from VG to Fidelity.
We called the local office and were asked how much investments were going to be moved so that they could assign the right person as our advisor, who turned out to be a VP and also a CFP. Because we wanted to go in the same day, the person had us meet with someone from her team, who is also a CFP, because she was unavailable that day. We met with this FA, who was excellent and he was very sharp. Since we were former clients there, he caught that my name was set up in their system wrongly. Well, my name is what I would say... difficult. He went about to call the back office folks as to what was needed to correct my name and got the process started, before setting up a new account and for the transfer to take place a few days later. He initiated the transfer for my husband from VG and ML immediately. Amidst all these, the VP came in and they were both the nicest and some of the smartest people whom we have met. We chatted about our goals etc and that we no longer wanted our investments managed and they agreed that they would support us with our self-directed investments.
At the end of all these, the FA team member person let us know to expect transfer bonus to be credited in 60 days and we each got our own allotment of bonus because we have individual accounts. We were beyond pleased.
We have been sending them many emails in the early days while waiting for the transfers to happen, and we got almost immediate replies from either our FA or this team member FA. They are on the ball.
We did our research on how we wanted to turn our portfolio into how we wanted to look and then set up an appointment on her calendar. We met with her last week and she was extremely helpful in showing us features and tools on the website on how to analyze our portfolio. She gave us feedback as to various funds and whether we should be overweight or not on some of the sectors. We set the appointment on her calendar for an hour and she blocked off 1.5 hours for us.
Other small stuff... because my husband had remaining RMD to withdraw, we called their 1800 number and someone helped him immediately and within a minute, the funds showed up in his checking account. Our FA also said if we are doing our RMD in December, the 1800 number may have longer hold times and to contact her instead and she will get a 3-way call in so that we get priority in getting our call answered.
Hope the above helps. If you have other questions, please let me know.
