Why would I want to? Is there a big difference between admiral shares and ETF?
My husband has his Roth with E*trade and bought VYM (ETF) 3 or 4 years ago on advice from a FI blogger. Problem is Etrade charges $19.99 fee to purchase Vanguard mutual funds or ETF's. Therefore, I'll likely rollover his Roth from E*T to VG before making the next Roth contribution and subsequent ETF purchase...likely more VYM as I'm happy w/its performance. That's about all I know about ETF's.
The Admiral shares and corresponding ETF's are invested in exactly the same stocks, just a different share class. If you transfer IRA to VG then there are no transaction fees for fund or ETF. One difference is with ETF you can buy/sell it anytime vs fund is at end of day, for long term this isn't an issue. Also, minimum investment is 1 share if minimums are an issue. Since you are already in Admiral funds that is not the case. But, if you want to invest in another Admiral fund and don't have minimum you can buy ETF and get the lower ER.
With VHT, you can get into a better performing health care investment with the same low expense ratio (0.12%) as the Admiral fund VHCIX which has $100K minimum.
Here is VG's webpage discussing ETF's https://investor.vanguard.com/etf/
a1smith, I don't know what you wanted to accomplish by pointing out that fartface can convert the
Admiral shares versions of some of her funds to ETFs. The only upside you've mentioned is that you can buy/sell at any time during the day as opposed to at the end of the day. But I seriously can't imagine any scenario where you need some funds immediately that day.
Also, you can just place a MF sell order during the day, and it will process after business closing.
You also neglect to inform fartface of the bid/ask spread that exists on any stock or ETF. Now with Vanguard's ETFs, they've got a lot of trade volume, so the bid/ask spread is small. But if you want to bring up the miniscule benefit of being able to trade ETFs during the day as opposed to after business close, then you should include this downside too.
If you want to know of an actual benefit of converting Admiral shares to their ETF versions, here's one:
If you wish to donate relatively small amounts of appreciated shares to charity, it's not really possible to donate MFs directly because you'll break the minimum investments for it. But you can convert some MF shares to ETFs, and then donate those. ETFs are extremely portable and every brokerage should accept them. Also, their "minimum investment" is just one share.
I've done this in the past.
The argument for an ETF having a lower expense ratio than the investor shares is a valid argument. This usually isn't worth fretting over for most Vanguard funds, as most funds have a $10k minimum for admiral shares. In this instance though, it is $100k and worth considering.
However, if you wish to automate investments, it is not possible to automate investments into ETFs, whereas it is possible to automate investments to MFs.
