For long I’ve had Vanguard as my primary investment holding institution. I’ve also dealt with Fidelity, Merrill, Interactive Brokers, Wells Fargo and others for various account types or deals, yet always kept Vanguard as my hub.
For some time I’ve been contemplating moving away from Vanguard. When they added the $100 account closure fee starting in July 2024, I decided to finally jump ship. (Note, some financial institutions will reimburse a closure fee so the $100 fee might be all that bad, in reality.)
I decided to move assets over to Robinhood for the 1% transfer bonus – that deal is still available through June 28th (for any asset request transfers by then).
I’ve never had a Robinhood account, and so I first opened a new Robinhood account through Rakuten for the $50/5,000 bonus. (I hope my asset transfer will suffice to trigger the $50 bonus. Does anyone know if the Rakuten bonus needs $100 cash or $100 in stocks/etfs works for that?) Somewhere along the way I also got a $7 bonus from a free stock that Robinhood gave me.
Now I’m ready to transfer over my assets. To simplify the process, I first called into Vanguard to convert my Vanguard mutual funds to their ETF equivalents. This makes them the funds easily portable.
It was simple to then initiate the transfer request from within Robinhood for the ETFs. A few days later I got an email confirmation from Robinhood that the transfer was completed and eligible for the bonus. The bonus is immediately available for investment which is cool. I’ll have to keep the transferred funds with Robinhood for two years in order to keep the bonus.
The only other funds I now have with Vanguard is a small chunk of money in a Roth IRA. To clean house, I’m considering transferring that over to Robinhood as well for a separate 1% bonus they have on IRAs transfers. (I feel bad that I missed out on the 3% IRA transfer deal, but that one is expired.) Then, I’ll make my 2024 Roth IRA contribution into Robinhood as well for the 1-3% match.
Tangentially, aside from 1) the 1% brokerage transfer deal, 2) the 1% IRA transfer deal, and 3) the IRA contribution 1-3% match, Robinhood also has a fourth deal 4) ongoing now for 1% on cash transfers.