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Vanguard's average fee is now 0.07% after biggest-ever cut

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271–279 of 279 posts

Re: Vanguard's average fee is now 0.07% after biggest-ever cut

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be related to how much money you have invested. They publish a list of levels that provide different levels of service. https://investor.vanguard.com/client-benefits The breakpoints are $50k, $500k, $1M, $5M.

Enough to not be treated like I was. Sorry that's vague.

Also, that page seems to be talking about like... financial advisor services. Most of the time I was just calling in to ask for help rolling over a 401k or something. I don't think I've ever called for actual investment advice of the sort that they seem to gate behind certain account sizes.

I'm wondering if it's something where company-sponsored plans sometimes have bad CS support because their support contracts are paid/arranged separately from if you just have a personal account. Or if some company plans have better support because they pay for it?

Re: Vanguard's average fee is now 0.07% after biggest-ever cut

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started using E-trade because of this instead of transferring my vested stock to Vanguard. Already had an account so it was zero effort to convert to my usual funds as ETFs which has the bonus of being transferable between brokerages unlike mutual funds.

You can frequently do in kind transfers of mutual funds, particularly between the big funds and brokers.

You can’t for funds that are only available at a single brokerage. This describes a lot of index funds and wrapper funds.

Re: Vanguard's average fee is now 0.07% after biggest-ever cut

#273
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a straw man argument when the counterargument you propose is "actually, evading regulation is the point".

If a country does not have a functioning banking system, then it isn't evading regulation.

Forget evading regulation that has been possible with cash or gold since millennia.

Its just sad that time and time again HN of all placed refuses to even consider that, yes magical p2p internet money does indeed have its uses outside of illegal activities.

Re: Vanguard's average fee is now 0.07% after biggest-ever cut

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can frequently do in kind transfers of mutual funds, particularly between the big funds and brokers.

You can’t for funds that are only available at a single brokerage. This describes a lot of index funds and wrapper funds.

The big index and wrapper funds at vanguard you absolutely can.

Re: Vanguard's average fee is now 0.07% after biggest-ever cut

#275
post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having voting rights kind of goes against the point of tracking an index though. Better invest in ESG funds or something like that. And for funds that use synthetic replication there is nothing to vote on in the first place.

> Having voting rights kind of goes against the point of tracking an index though. Not sure I follow how voting rights goes against the point of tracking an index? I'd say the value of the index implicitly prices in the value of the voting rights in the constituents. So if your index does not contain the voting rights, should the index price not be different? > And for funds that use synthetic replication there is no…

The provider of the index is usually not the same entity as the fund manager. Although the fund is actually quite free in the choice of securities that it can use to track the index. It depends on the fine print of the prospectus. It could conceivably offer its shareholders voting rights regarding the presence of controversial items in its portfolio, at the risk of underperformance compared to the reference index.

Re: Vanguard's average fee is now 0.07% after biggest-ever cut

#276
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I've been using the card since late 2019 and had zero issues with it. There aren't a lot of 2% cards that just straight give you 2% cash back w/o any hoops[1]. The Fidelity card is no muss no fuss for me. 2% just magically appears in my designated Fidelity account at the end of the month. I have not had to interact with Elan customer service, so I can't speak to that. I also don't care about the Fidelity mobile…

I used this card for a few months before usbank launched their smartly card, at which point I moved 100k from fidelity to a usbank IRA and now enjoy 4% cash back.

Elan is a division of US Bank, so while the branding on your card might have changed, its being run by the same company.

Re: Vanguard's average fee is now 0.07% after biggest-ever cut

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We tried using vanguard. The UX/UI was so bad we went through the work of transferring everything to fidelity. They've got a pretty decent app. Vanguard has so much friction on what should be very simple and common tasks. There's no excuse for that. I can say pretty confidently that cutting fees won't be enough. They need a total rewrite of all their customer facing software and web stuff, and they probably need to r…

Vanguard's website revamp in the past three years was disappointing because in the past, I can visit just one (landing) page and get almost all of the info I need about my holdings + actions I could take on them and my accounts. Now, I have to click through a myriad of pages to do what I want. Plus, in Firefox browser at least, if you want to 'Exit' the order and some other pages, it simply doesn't work, so I have to…

> Vanguard's website revamp in the past three years was disappointing because in the past, I can visit just one (landing) page and get almost all of the info I need about my holdings + actions I could take on them and my accounts.

Bookmark https://holdings.web.vanguard.com/

Re: Vanguard's average fee is now 0.07% after biggest-ever cut

#278
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true for mutual funds, but Vanguard ETFs are available on Fidelity with no fees.

And ETFs are generally more tax efficient anyways. I'm not sure what the benefit to funds are.

One benefit to Mutual Funds is that you can do things like reinvest dividends, or investment plans. It's not a fundamental advantage that a mutual fund has, but no brokers that I am aware of would let you do those things with an ETF. So if you have long term "forget it" account, with ETFs it will accumulate cash from dividends. And the tax benefit of ETFs doesn't really help in a tax advantaged account (e.g. retirement). Finally, theoretically at least, when you buy an ETF there is an explicit "transaction cost". Even when they don't charge you a commission, there's a bid ask spread. Mutual funds trade at NAV both ways (unless of course there's an external transaction cost separately disclosed).

Re: Vanguard's average fee is now 0.07% after biggest-ever cut

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is to me too! I would never do that normally. It's just that it was THAT bad. It took me MONTHS to figure out how to sell a particular fund to buy another one. Somehow every time I tried to do it, it failed. I kept coming back to it over and over and different things went wrong. It was also very difficult to figure out the status of an order. It was literally that clunky, and I've been trading for decades. I run m…

Twice I've been unsure how to move move money with their site and twice I've contacted their customer service center who was more than happy to guide me through the process.

This particular one was only a few thousand dollars worth, and so the issue just never reached a high enough priority for me to invest the time to call ciatomer service.

I just kept checking it once in a while when i had a few seconds to spare.

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