Hi there long time lurker here
I have about 15K USD of shares/stocks sitting in Computeshare and Morgan and Stanley
I was going to take the money out and run but being the miser, I hate paying bank fees etc...
PS I don't need the money for at least 10 years so I have no problem leaving it there but I think I could be using this part of my stache more efficiently.
I started to think of some options (dangerous for me )
1) Do nothing and pray the company starts recovering.
2) Take the hit like everybody else and pay the bank their "blood" money. so I can invest on home soil.
3) If I had a US savings account and then did the transfer to AUD on my own terms,canned that idea since I am lazy and trying to set up an account in the USA has been filed in my too hard basket.
4) That's when I thought of diversifying my small parcel of shares.
I would like to explore option 4 by opening up a brokerage account like TD Ameritrade account (or similar) since there is no ongoing fees plus it looks like they set up a cash account Therefore I could use a peer to peer currency service when I want to transfer to AUD and hopefully get a better rate.
My thoughts is that I could transfer my holdings to the brokerage account then I could sell 10K of my parcel and then purchase other stocks/ETF in order to diversify also I hope to minimize bank fees and charges.
Not sure on the actual costs involved but would appreciate any other thoughts on why this is a bad/good idea. I am open to any other suggestions and criticisms.
