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A lot of HD readers are DIY investors who value ease and simplicity. That means we are managing our own online accounts with no advisor middleman, for better or worse.
Reading this recent forum post about protecting your retirement accounts from scammers, with all its great comments, prompts me to share this experience.
Before dinnertime the other evening I logged onto my Vanguard account and at the top of the familiar red VG dashboard I was greeted in display-size type,
“Welcome back, $0.00.”
(I have a screenshot but can’t post it here.)
After I stuffed my eyeballs back into my head, I was able to focus on a small-text box in a different area on the page that said “Data unavailable. Our system is temporarily unable to display some of your account information. We apologize for any inconvenience. … Please refresh in a few minutes or choose another page.”
My eyes kept going back to that scary $0 at the top of the page. Honestly, for a moment it seemed like my worst nightmare (bag lady) had come true. But then I logged off and logged back on and the real numbers showed up this time.
I have no wise lesson to impart from the above. But I wondered if others have experienced an “interesting” moment while managing their own accounts that they would care to share?
How frightening that $0 screen must have seemed, Laura.
I’ve had some cautionary and unexpected episodes. All seem sad in the computer age.
The most memorable was having my first two years of 403(b)) funds deposted into the account of a professor at a distant university. I kept asking my HR office why I hadn’t received any statements; they kept saying this was normal, part of a vesting period. After receiving a letter at my address from the financial firm addressed to the professor, I caught on. Unscrambling the accounts took over a month, multiple phone calls, and paper communications.
Somewhat similarly, a different financial firm once credited my account with an erroneous $40,000 deposit from another account holder. A phone call to the firm resolved this within a day.
I also recall trying to redeem a CD at a local branch bank. The cashier computed the payout based on semi-annual compounding. I disputed the calculation; the CD compounded monthly, as it clearly stated (albeit in fine print). The branch manager doubted this and needed to consult with the main branch. Two days later, I received the correct payout.
Lastly, like you but in the opposite direction, I’ve seen the total value of an account inflated by a million dollars on the initial login screen. That was resolved by an unknown webmaster over a weekend.
I have $32.8 million reasons on why I might have one of the more fun tales about managing personal retirement accounts. That was the posted value of one of my financial accounts at a well-known financial broker on August 31, 2020. I still have the screen shot to prove I was at this brief point-in-time worth gazillions even though the account’s true value needed the decimal moved nearly two places to the left.
This was the day of the Apple share split. I had a couple hundred shares of Apple, and somehow the broker’s computer got the split accounting wrong by thousands of percent.
I did have one of those contemplative moments of thought – “should I withdraw the whole account and maybe no one won’t notice?” Naaahh. Two days later, I was back to my Humble Dollar writing self trying to figure out how to save a few bucks on taxes.
“Two days later, I was back to my Humble Dollar writing self”, and your Humble Dollar account balance!
David – Indeed. Humble Dollar would not be the place for anyone with that much money in just one of their financial accounts. I also would not be worrying about or writing about exceeding an IRMMA bracket for Roth conversions. 😉
Our providers are able to give us lots of features, sometimes very shortly after they recognize the need for such features, and in a changing business and technical environment, in large part by quickly linking together a number of independently designed, maintained, and operated systems. As a result, systems have a number of independent points of failure. If they hadn’t gotten pretty good at making each of those system pretty reliable, we’d see thing broken more often that working. But as we enjoy all this cool stuff, we need to expect it to be broken at times, likely when we need it most, and to manage our dependency on it accordingly. Unfortunately, this may be be a bit less efficient for us; for example, it may be prudent to do some preliminary income estimates for tax planning purposes a bit early, to have something in case there is an outage when we hope to do right before year-end, etc.
Some years ago my IRA was at Schwab and I wanted to do an end-of-year Roth conversion of part of it. This required estimating my taxes for that year so I could figure out how much to convert to “fill out” my tax bracket without going into the next higher bracket. I was not able to do this until the last few days of the year, but when I attempted to do the conversion, the Schwab computers were down! The telephone reps said there was nothing they could do, just try again tomorrow. I went down to the local office and they said the computers were not going to be back running until after Jan 1, but I should hand them actual paperwork, they’d send it in, and when the computer was back up the central office would probably be able to backdate it. Despite my fears and a week of uncertainty, they did eventually accomplish that, but I immediately transferred a portion of the IRA to Vanguard so that I would have a second option in the future in case there was a problem with one company. More complexity with two companies but worth avoiding a repeat of the stress of that year! (No down computers since then with either company that I’m aware of, which I fully attribute to my move to diversify.)
Not me personally, but I had a tax client who was unhappy with her financial person. I introduced her to an advisor I worked with. They filled out the paperwork to transfer her account. A few days later she looked at her old account, $0 balance. Then she looked at the new account, also a $0 balance because the money hadn’t been received yet. She totally freaked out, certain that my guy stole her money. The next business day the money was received and she immediately had it transferred to another advisor.