I'm helping a friend transfer his accounts to Vanguard from a different and very expensive brokerage and the transfers are just about done. Due to the HIGH number of funds involved and the terrible commission schedule at his old brokerage, it was cheaper to just transfer each account entirely to Vanguard and sell things there, but I'd like to inquire about whether there's anything else we could do to improve what we're doing.
Specific questions:
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It seems like Vanguard doesn't allow exchanges from non-Vanguard funds into Vanguard funds so separate sell orders will be required for each and every fund and with many funds at $20 commission (still better than the original brokerage), I'm just wondering if there is an easier and/or cheaper way to do this? It's going to take forever to do all of these sales (there are 40-50 different funds across 3 accounts) and the phone trades are even worse at $50 each.
I did investigate whether getting to Voyager status with a few initial sales and Vanguard purchases (he has between $50k and $500k) would help with commissions, but it seems like the commission for transaction-fee mutual funds stays at $20 regardless.
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Related to above, is it possible to purchase Vanguard mutual funds from the projected proceeds before the settlement date? How exactly does this work? A Vanguard CS agent said something about being able to buy 90% of the value, but they didn't really explain it well and no credit is showing up from the initial orders we made after market close yesterday.
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Mutual fund orders can't be cancelled at Vanguard? We went ahead and sold a few positions after market close and I noticed that there's no cancel button on the orders page? Is that right?!
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My friend is tempted to enroll into Vanguard PAS just to simplify the process. I know PAS liquidates everything when you enroll an account. Do they still charge commissions for those sales? It'd actually be cheaper for my friend to enroll into PAS for 3 months than paying commissions on selling these funds... especially if it avoid commissions and can be cancelled in 3 to 6 months? Is this a crazy idea?
Thanks in advance.
Some additional info:
- I did consider Fidelity or another brokerage with better potential for waiving fees or a small incoming account bonus, but my friend may end up using Vanguard PAS and it was important to keep things simple. I did not anticipate needing to individually submit 40+ sell orders since I've never owned non-Vanguard funds at Vanguard before.
Submitted March 13, 2019 at 10:21AM by decent_neighbor https://ift.tt/2O2fxOg
