Hello,
Thanks in advance for your help, because I think I need it 🙂
So today I got to take a look at my parents’ investment account at Ameriprise Financial and I think they’re getting ripped off... big time. It looks like their returns were decent, but that wasn’t exactly hard in the last 10 years. The Ameriprise website is purposely confusing and misleading. This was all the information I could gather.
This is their current portfolio:
- $150k CBLCX (Expense ratio: 1.7% ; Back-end load: 1% ; Columbia Balanced Fund Class C)
- $25k INDZX (Expense ratio: 1.01% ; Front-end load: 5.75% ; Columbia Large Cap Value Fund Class A)
- $80k “HSBC USA INC BUF AMPS LKD SPX CPN 0.000% DUE 10/31/19 DTD 04/28/17” (It’s listed under fixed income, with no additional information provided. Maybe it’s a CD at 0% yield...?)
Compared to my humble Vanguard IRA, the fees seem outrageous!! I.e. INDZX is composition-wise basically the same as VUVLX at Vanguard, which has just 0.22% expense ratio).
I think my parents need to have a serious talk with their “advisor”, and I’m considering moving their investments into cheaper Vanguard funds.
I was wondering what critical questions to ask the advisor in this situation. I was thinking:
- Exactly what fees are due if each of the funds were to be sold?
- What taxable capital gains are due if we were to sell?
- Are there any sort of transfer fees?
- ??
Also if we were to move to Vanguard, I’d like to opt for comparable funds to not throw their strategy completely out of the window. I was thinking:
- CBLCX -> 60% Stock (VTSAX) + 40 Bonds (VBMFX)
- INDZX -> VUVLX (or VTSAX)
- “HSBC USA INC BUF AMPS LKD SPX CPN” -> ???
Any help is highly appreciated, since I want to make sure my parents have the best retirement plan possible. They have done so much for me and I’d love to help them out here 🙂
Submitted April 14, 2019 at 01:44AM by 1CuriousKitten http://bit.ly/2Ug6Dyv
