Greetings!
I am just starting to take some control of my finances and have finally managed to get the last securities out of Edward Jones and into Vanguard! Being quite new and therefore insecure in all of this, I feel like that was a pretty big step.
But
In the process of moving a Roth IRA and Traditional IRA over, when they hit Vanguard each had a debit of just under $150 [in Vanguard, as an example, one appeared simply as "transfer (incoming) -149.64"]. When I asked Vanguard they said it must have been a fee from Edward Jones and they covered that fee for the first while until I could transfer money in to cover it, which I did immediately.
When I went to my former "financial advisor" she insisted it must have been from Vanguard and she sent me this:
TRANSFER TO VANGUARD MARKET
T60: Transfer to
NS: Customer Acct Transfer Dept
$ 149.64
She insists Vanguard took the money because from her end it looks like a + transfer? I don't know but she is not being helpful. Which, she never was helpful in the first place and anything smart I did with my investments was in spite of her advice rather than because of it but that is a whole different story and probably not a new one to a forum such as this. Anyway.
The total of the two negative balances in Vanguard equaled $288, which,
a) happen to equal exactly 1% of my total portfolio and
b) if someone walked up and took that kind of money directly out of my hand, I'd not simply stand by. As it has happened digitally and everyone says someone else is responsible and I have no idea where to begin to try to track it down, I was about to just throw my hands up and walk away in frustration. But a 2 am google search for a few key terms led me to this forum where Frankie's Girl mentioned "back-end loads" which led me here to writing this post and hoping one of you might give me some leads and lingo to try to track it down? Or tell me to let it go and move on with my life now that I'm done having my tiny stash of nickles and dimes getting nickled and dimed by EJ.
A bit of background: I am quite new to all of this. I've been poking around in bits for years, took a Dave Ramsey course when I was just out of college, listen to Freakonomics and a few other financial advice podcasts when I hike (open to recommendations!), reading through the JL Collins series lately, that sort of thing but still a bit dizzied by it all.
So I guess I am asking, if you are kind enough to answer me here, please speak simply and if you use acronyms please also spell them out.
Anyway, thanks for any guidance you can give!
