My Mistakes

Thank you Jonathan for as always, for your willingness to tell your story, the good and the bad.

I have one big mistake to get out there.

About 10 years before my wife and I retired, I started getting interested in money. I educated myself about index versus managed funds, fees, etc. While both of us had sizable 403b accounts that were tied up at work, I put all our after tax money in Vanguard. When we retired, both our traditional IRA’s were moved to Vanguard. I was happy with the decisions we had made regarding Vanguard.
We retired in 2013 and promptly moved from Ohio where our jobs were to Austin TX. One of the first things we did was open a checking account at the closest bank which happened to be a Wells Fargo. When the bank learned of the amount of our assets, they were all over us suggesting we meet with their high net worth specialists. We could have said no but thought it wouldn’t be a bad idea to listen. So to make this long story short, in a matter of weeks we had signed up with them to take care of all our IRA and after tax money. They had an impressive sales pitch that we fell for complete with many hard to understand fancy colorful graphs. So now all our money was tied up at Wells Fargo with a 1.5% fee compared to the much lower Vanguard fee. All of the attention we received was on the front end to get the money. In the 2 years we were with them, our contact never reached out to talk about how things were going. Also during those 2 years we received almost impossible to understand statements with contact names and phone numbers that didn’t in any way line up with the people we signed up with. So, after two years of this, I did some rough math and determined we would have been better off staying with Vanguard and in the process realized I had violated to of my most important aspects of investing. Simplicity and low fees. So we decided to go back to Vanguard where I could understand and keep track of things. It should come as no surprise that there was plenty of help when it came to getting our money and almost zero help in getting it back. It took 8 months, many phone calls and a $1,000 redemption fee per account. Sometimes you have to learn the hard way. Trust yourself and remember there are people out there who desperately want your money but aren’t very interested in you once they have it.