Inherited stocks and want to move to Vanguard

[octopus28]

My grandfather passed away and left me about 35,000 in mutual funds 83%, Equities 12%, and Net cash equiv 4%. I would like to take them out of where they currently are (Stifel) and move them to Vanguard. I am VERY uninformed about this and welcome any and all advice.

Do I cash this out and then take it to Vanguard?
What tax implications are there for cashing out?
Can I put it into my rollover IRA with vanguard or does it need to go into a brokerage account?
I would like to gift 10,000(cash) of it to someone in great need. Any tax implications here?

Any other thoughts, advice etc. appreciated. Thank you!

[draco44]

Sorry for your loss.

It sounds like what you want to do is called an "account transfer." That's a process whereby you move money from an IRA or other account held at another company into a new or existing IRA or other Vanguard account. If the money is instead coming from an employer-sponsored plan, such as a 401(k) or 403(b), into a new or existing Vanguard IRA, that is called a "rollover."

I haven't had to do this with Vanguard myself, but start here:
https://investor.vanguard.com/account-transfer/
https://investor.vanguard.com/account-transfer/how-to-transfer-money

[octopus28]

Thank you. Yeah, I wasn't sure if I could just transfer it or if I needed to cash out and then buy vanguard stocks. Thank you for the links!

[draco44]

My pleasure. The only other thing I can think of is that while Vanguard doesn't charge fees for incoming or outgoing transfers, you'll need to check if Stifel has any fees or special requirements. Understandably, it's in a company's best interest to make it as easy as possible for you to give them money, but they may have some hoops you have to jump through to remove your money.

Good luck to you!

[octopus28]

Excellent point. Thank you!

[Novik]

I've transferred accounts away from Stifel twice (myself & a sibling), and it was pretty painless. I can't give you any detailed tips since I was doing it into Canada, but I can say I initiated the process from the new account in Canada and didn't have any roadblocks, extra fees etc that I noticed from Stifel.

I would recommend making sure to download / get a copy of all your cost basis info from Stifel before moving/closing the account, just in case the info doesn't transfer or there's some edge cases.

[octopus28]

Oh cool, thank you! So you were able to transfer w/o cashing out? Any advice on if I did that but wanted to pull 10k?

Thanks!

[Novik]

Do you have a chequebook for the Stifel account? Is it hooked up to any of your other bank accounts for transferring money? If so AND you have 10k or more in cash in the account, it could make sense to get that out first and then initiate the transfer.

But selling will pretty likely be much cheaper at Vanguard than with Stifel, so if you need to sell things to get to 10k cash, then I'd wait until after the move. Of course, that assumes you can afford to wait for the cash.

And I'll caveat that I don't have any particular experience with mutual funds so if there are any that are Stifel-specific (is that a thing?) then you may want to call them up and ask some questions.