As for transferring out. There have been reports of that but the way I see it is you put money in to go with their strategy or not. . They work far better when you are all in with them for the long term.
Yeah, I recently researched trying to transfer out my taxable portfolio, but after looking into it I really don't want to deal with all the different assets I now own after several TLH events. There are just a bunch of different ETFs after all of the TLH events that happened in 2018.
I've decided to just keep the taxable amount I have in Betterment, and started investing in VTI at Vanguard.
I actually wrote an article on how to set it up so that you don't avoid partial washes with Betterment's TLH+ by owning VTI at both of them:
https://thejordanburnett.com/owning-vti-at-both-vanguard-and-betterment/
Couldn't you just tell Betterment you wanted to transfer the ETF's to Vanguard? Then you won't be paying that 0.25% fee to Betterment and there will not be any taxable events from selling the ETF's at Betterment.
Yes, I could. But, I've heard from many others that this process is fairly lengthy (several weeks of not being invested) and that it takes a long time to get things straight on the Vanguard side (from a tax lot and cost basis perspective).
I also don't really have any desire to manually get back to owning only Vanguard funds. Currently, because of TLH+ at Betterment, I own more than the base funds (I own partial of both primary and secondary ETFs):
EMB and VWOB
MUB and TFI
VWO and IEMG
VBR and IWN
VTV and SCHV
VTI and SCHB
Those are Schwab, SPDR, and iShares ETFs as well.
That's a lot of clutter for my current one fund accounts at Vanguard (VTSAX in Roth/Traditional IRA and VTI in Taxable). Part of my problem was switching to being a Boglehead after already having a significant amount in Betterment, as well.
Also, Betterment doesn't permit partial transfers. There are a few taxable sub-accounts that I'd like to keep at Betterment (I have short term accounts for Personal Development, World Travel, Safety Net, etc.). Behind the scenes, these are actually only a single account at Betterment.
Thus, Betterment only allows a full transfer (I would have to transfer all assets to Vanguard and then rebuild those funds inside of Betterment).