God I hate Broadridge Shareholder services

[Hermes]

Anyone else had to deal with them? What a nightmare.

I had joint stock in my and my late mother's name (bad idea, don't do this to your kids). Turns out the stock had split many times over the years. It has taken me 4 years to untangle this mess and get about $3,100 out of it (not a bad sum).

They made it as painful as possible. Needed to go through all the paperwork for each account. I couldn't just submit the death certificate and forms for all of the accounts. Nope, had to be all done separately. And every step took about a month's wait in between steps. Need each account number? Fill out this form and mail it, we will mail you the account numbers in a month. Need to create an online account for each account? Great. Fill out this form and mail it to us and we'll get back to you in a month.

I realize some of this is FTC regulations, but wow was this painful.

 

[VanWinkle]

Sorry to hear of the poor service they gave you.

VW

 

[Greenblue]

I had some inherited stock with Share Owner Services, run by Equinity. Previously run by Wells Fargo. Anyway, they were similarly horrible. Paperwork for any little thing, even though they had a seemingly normal website. But the site was borked. I noticed the dividend payments for the stock were being partially reinvested, but I didn't want any reinvested (not enough diversification to buy more of the same), so I change it on the site, hit okay at the "confirm changes" page, and suddenly it was set to reinvest ALL dividends and the webpage for making changes wouldn't load. Ever. A months later and I still couldn't make changes.

More annoying stuff happened, but I'll leave it at thankfully the stock's company shifted to Computershare as their brokerage (or whatever the right term is). They've been much better.

 

[Hermes]

Wow that sounds not great. Have you considered selling it? Thankfully mine was a small amount so it was worth the capital gains hit to get rid of it.

 

[Texas Proud]

Computershares is not that great either... was going to sell some stock to get money out to heir and the fee was $25!!!

After that I moved everything to Vanguard since mom already had accounts there and it was just adding to her estate account. The sold for free.

But mom had two different stocks and had to do paperwork for both... luckily we did not have more...

 

[MarieIG]

Computershares is not that great either... was going to sell some stock to get money out to heir and the fee was $25!!!

After that I moved everything to Vanguard since mom already had accounts there and it was just adding to her estate account. The sold for free.

But mom had two different stocks and had to do paperwork for both... luckily we did not have more...

Computer share was pretty bad but three of my holdings were transferred to one that was even worse! I have since transferred the smaller holdings over to Schwab.

 

[Greenblue]

This thread is making me nervous about ComputerShare now...

Wow that sounds not great. Have you considered selling it? Thankfully mine was a small amount so it was worth the capital gains hit to get rid of it.

Mine was inherited a long while ago, and grew 10x since then. So I'd be looking at plenty of capital gains tax if I sold.