Yeah, I don't know if the incentives would be enough to make it worth it for me to move my money out of a brokerage I was already in and happy with their services.
In our case, we're selling our house, and the sale is scheduled to close in a couple weeks, which means I need to find a home for $600K pretty soon. Until just recently, I always assumed I'd just put the money at Vanguard where we already have our IRAs, but for some reason Vanguard is refusing to allow us to designate a beneficiary on a joint taxable account. WTF? I talked with a Vanguard rep on the phone, and he couldn't really explain why Vanguard refuses to do that, but he confirmed that they wouldn't do it for us...
All I want to do is dump the money into VTSAX, so it seems kind of dumb for Vanguard to not be willing accommodate my wishes, but I guess they have a right to make whatever rules they like.
When I called up TDAmeritrade, their rep was like, "Sure, you want a joint taxable TOD account with a beneficiary, no problem, and by the way, we'll give you $1200 cash bonus for opening the account." I read through the fine print on the deal, and it looks like accepting the 1200 bucks will lock me into TDAmeritrade for 1 year. If I decide to close the account before one year, then they may require that I repay the opening bonus money. I'm not planning on moving the money within a year, so that shouldn't really make a difference in my case. After one year, if I close the account and move the money to another brokerage, I'll have to pay a $75 fee, but that's not much compared to the $1200 I'll get for opening the account.
VTI is on the list of 100+ commission free ETFs that I can buy and sell as much as I want without paying a fee. TDAmeritrade doesn't seem to be the only brokerage that has a bunch of ETFs they allow you to trade for no commissions. Does anyone know what's up with that? How can they afford to do that? Is that just to entice customers in and then once they get hooked on trading they start paying the fees?
TDAmeritrade does seem to be hoping to convince me to become a frequent trader. In addition to the $1200 they're going to give me to open the account, I also get 300 free trades during the first 60 days. So, clearly, they're hoping to get me hooked into day trading or whatever. I clearly told the rep on the phone that I was only planning on making one "trade" on my account when I first opened it. I told him I was planning on putting all $600K into VTI and let it ride for the next 100 years. :)