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In recent years, I’ve regularly heard from readers who have faced service snafus at Vanguard Group. Many of these folks have stuck with Vanguard’s exchange-traded funds, but moved their accounts to Charles Schwab or Fidelity Investments, with an eye to getting better service.
Over the past 12 months, however, I’ve heard far fewer complaints from readers. Does that mean service has improved—or does that just reflect the fact that the disgruntled have moved on and those who remain are willing to live with occasional poor service?
I have had investments with Vanguard for at least 25 years. (Neither my memory nor my records go back further.) I have always been happy to have my investments there, and over the years I have shifted all of my stock and bond investments into Vanguard. On the few occasions when I needed any help moving funds into Vanguard, they were easy to contact and very helpful. I have had no problems navigating their website, though I admit to being an IT geek.
Vanguard used to provide access to financial planners for free if you had over a certain amount invested there (half a million, I think). I used that as a sounding board when I was considering retiring at 60, and their help was quite useful. I even got to talk to one of the advisors whom I later saw on one of their online video interviews. Unfortunately, they no longer offer that free service, but the 0.3% charge is quite reasonable, though I have not tried it.
I did taxes for a friend in 2018, and he had at least 40 different losing funds at Fidelity. I checked, and these averaged .72% expenses. I don’t know how many other funds he had. He was paying at least 0.5% for financial management, but it did not appear Fidelity was doing much for the money. They did have him harvesting tax losses in each of those funds. However, a good financial manager would have recommended, as I did, that he dump those 40+ high-fee, actively managed funds. I recommended that he shift into a small number of Fidelity’s or Vanguard’s low-fee index funds, but my friend refused to discuss it. You can take a horse to water… I’m pretty sure Vanguard would have given him better advice for less money.
I would stay far away from Vanguard. They are either stupid or scammers. I have a savings account with them. I have been trying for 3 weeks now to withdraw my money. All to no avail. Customer service is non-existant. No such thing there. It get’s worse. Instead of crediting my PNC account. They debited it for 20K today. Yes, I still have not been able to sucessfully withdraw and close my Vanguard account. Plus, the morins stole another 20K from me. Customer service doesn’t have the authority to do anything. Plus, they can’t even answer reasonable questions. I would stay away from these thieves.
So I commented back in July that I had only positive experiences with Vanguard. Well like all good things that has come to an end. I recently experienced a problem with account access and it remains unresolved for more than a week. Their last response was it will take at least a week more to resolve the problem. I am actually considering leaving Vanguard as their response has been woefully inadequate!
We have been with Vanguard for decades as well. We have a simple DIY portfolio with only a handful of funds to keep things simple. Recently Vanguard contacted me to provide feedback on the firm. I used to think Vanguard was the best but my feedback now had it about a 5 out of 10 for ‘would I recommend them’ due to other firms improving (I.e. Fidelity,Schwab etc) and VG not improving as much. The website is not as good as it used to be for DIYers, and now there is quite a bit of hard sell for their advising services which use an (albeit quite low) assets under management (AUM) model. I am a little put off by the constant selling up of these services that I do not believe I need and I wish their online tools were better. I am not leaving VG but I hope they are aware of some perceptions customers have of their ‘slipping’ against the competitors.