They did send me a form by secure messaging. Had to fill it out, scan and secure message it back (or print/mail). I provided that with my lawyers text for what we wanted. Essentially left IRA to one trust or another depending who survives. I wonder if same can type of custom beneficiary can be used in your scenario. What took time was to find the right person/team that knew what to do, but after a couple of phone calls it was very fast to accomplish my objective with custom beneficiaries.I did just discover that beneficiaries can be submitted in writing rather than input online. I received the form today. It required a special request and a wait of 72 hours for Vanguard to e-mail the form. Perhaps this is how you accomplished getting the beneficiary designation you wanted?Regarding beneficiaries, my attorney drafted a rather non-trivial description of what we needed for beneficiary.I have two issues with Vanguard.What "estate planning issues" do you speak of ?Because of estate planning issues, my DH and I are considering moving from Vanguard to Fidelity.
I had a non-trivial estate plan created last year and Vanguard helped implement what was need there.
My attorney did indicate he had other clients who did same at Fidelity should I have any issues at Vanguard, but no issues arose.
I did move to ETFs mostly but not just so I can move to another broker.
There are pros and cons but porting to another broker was one consideration for any future issues that may arise.
More immediately, I prefer lower fees, intraday valuation of my account, making intraday rebalancing easier.
I have dividend reinvestment automated in IRA accounts at Vanguard, don't want that in taxable accounts.
For any automated cash transfers I have typically used a Vanguard money market fund to hold some cash and feed required cash to a bank either automated or adhoc at times. You can also turn off dividend reinvestment and allow the dividends to go to a money market fund from where it can easily be transferred to a bank or another account. This all works fine at Vanguard.
1. Establishing Beneficiaries as desired
2. Vanguard does not accept DPOA
Again thank you all for the thoughtful responses.
We did have to speak to a couple of different people at Vanguard until we found someone who understood what we needed and created a "custom beneficiary" using our document. The person who finally took care of it even admitted that some departments don't really understand this. But it is supported by Vanguard if you get the right team. Was a year ago for me, but try this email beneficiaryteam@vanguard.com
So yeah they have limitations in regards to self serve beneficiary designation, but for my IRAs we had a very complex description and they have agreed to honor it. If you are talking about a taxable account outside a trust having joint owners plus a beneficiary, then I agree they do not support this online. But MAYBE they can do a custom beneficiary for taxable accounts too, worth asking them. I only asked for IRA accounts.
Regarding DPOA, what is your purpose ?
Trustees do not need a DPOA to manage.
Successor trustees will be able to take over the accounts when you are unable, without DPOA.
One can also designate someone else to have access to any accounts, via their own login, if you want them to help manage your acct.
My spouse gave me access to all her accounts online. Was a bit more manual to do so for a trust, as they required a paper form rather than the all online process for trusts. Your trust just needs to indicate in theory that the trustee (my spouse let's say) is able to delegate tasks such as asset management to someone else. Most trusts allow this, and even if not clearly worded as so, Vanguard didn't even look at the language of our trust, they just wanted to see the 1st/last pages with trust name/date/signatures.
Our atty did draft the POA documents but we have never used them for anything and do not seem to need them at Vanguard to manage our accounts.
I was hoping to avoid creating a trust. Partly because of the complexity and partly because of the expense. For the immediate future I thought I could accomplish what I needed now with DPOAs and beneficiary designations. Perhaps that idea is misplaced.
Cheers.
Are you trying to deal with the lack of support for beneficiary on joint taxable accts ? Did they say you can add a custom beneficiary in such case ? In my case, before moving to a trust, we just kept a brokerage taxable acct in my name, spouse as beneficiary, and children as contingent beneficiaries. The creation of a trust was not related to this issue at Vanguard nor simply to avoid probate.
Statistics: Posted by beyou — Wed May 01, 2024 6:36 am — Replies 19 — Views 1651