Freezing in NH

A couple years ago due to some interesting circumstances, I had a very short window of time to take my money out of a 401(k) that was closing.  Because a lot of other things were also changing, I took the easy way out and signed the forms my 401(k) company sent which just moved the money into a rollover IRA with the same company.  Very easy, nothing needed to be notarized, etc, etc.  And it’s been chugging along getting a little bigger every year. 

But recently I’ve been re-evaluating all my finances (starting a blog was one of the things that came out of this) and I took a closer look at the IRA.   I have yet another 401(k) from a long time ago and I was contemplating rolling it into the IRA as well.  Then I looked at the management fees.  Wow!  No wonder it only got a little bigger every year. 

 After much looking around, I decided to go with Vanguard.  They have low fees and really that’s about all that matters to me.  I’m not going to be touching the IRA more than once a year (for rebalancing) so I don’t need a website with bells and whistles and I don’t want a live advisor because they might convince me to make changes I don’t need to make. 

The process was kind of a pain in the neck, but it’s not something I need to do every day.  First I had to fill out a bunch of forms online with Vanguard, then print them out and have some sort of banking guy put a magic stamp on them.  This required driving around town on two different days (I first tried to do it on a Saturday, and guys with the magic stamp don’t work on Saturdays) to different branches until I found the right guy.  [The stamp is a Signature Guarantee, definition here for the interested.]

Then it just took time.  Now the money is all at Vanguard and I just have to deal with the original company (apparently moving all your money out is not the same as closing the account, so I have a zero-value IRA with them that is still accruing fees).  Next step is to figure out the fees on the very old 401(k) and decide if I want to put that in with the rollover IRA as well.   I probably will, mostly because it will be easier to deal with one place rather than two, and I have enough trouble dealing with allocation and rebalancing as it is.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 5th, 2007 at 9:08 am and is filed under retirement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.