Moving stocks to Vanguard from Morgan Stanley

[Krishna]

Hello, I have my brokerage account in Vanguard where I have a few Vanguard Mutual funds.

I recently got laid off from a company and their stocks are in Morgan Stanley (MS). Morgan Stanley is OK - no major issues - but it would be nice to have all brokerage investments in a common location so I was thinking of moving those stocks from MS to Vanguard. MS Have said there is no extra fees to keep it there, but its a restricted account where I can only sell and not buy or invest in anything else. So here are my questions:

1. Is this a good idea to go from MS -> Vanguard?

2. These stocks have different acquisition dates, so when I move from MS -> Vanguard, will that reset? I do not want the dates to reset so that when I sell I can have long-term tax benefits.

[svosavvy]

Hi,  I am a huge fan of Vanguard so if you can do the rollover I vote do it.  I am not professional only a layperson.  If you do a rollover your buy/sell dates shouldn't change as you are not doing either.  Kind of like parking a car, if you change garages you still have your car. 

Once I rolled over a Roth IRA from Etrade to Merrill and it took a while for for my dates to show up in the new account, but, they got there eventually.  I really need to rollover a 403b we have with TIAA-CREF to Vanguard.  I really don't have anything nice to say about them.  It feels like the only people who like that company are the employers.  They must get a really good deal on that product.  From a consumer standpoint is like ford pinto performance with Mercedes car payment fee.

[MustacheAndaHalf]

2. These stocks have different acquisition dates, so when I move from MS -> Vanguard, will that reset? I do not want the dates to reset so that when I sell I can have long-term tax benefits.

I'd recommend finding the page listing the "cost basis" (*) of those stocks and printing that out.  That way if the purchase information doesn't transfer correctly, you still have the data for your taxes.

(*) "cost basis" is the term used by the IRS, and on most investment platforms.  You can think of it as purchase price with potential adjustments (commissions paid, stock splits, etc).

[J.P. MoreGains]

I had investments in American Funds and it was worth it for me to move it to Vanguard to get lower fees. It felt really stressful because I had never moved a lot of money like that before but it was worth it. Institutions do transfers like that all the time and the Vanguard people were helpful.

For me the big incentive was the lower fees.

[travel2020]

I did something similar, and consolidated from MS to Fidelity. Makes things simpler and highly recommend doing so.

For some reason, the cost basis for my stock didn’t transfer as I had been told it would and I didn’t realize that till a few years later when I sold some shares. It was a pain to figure out the cost basis from old printed documents. So highly recommend downloading a copy or taking a snapshot of the various lots and cost basis for future reference just in case.