Employment Information for Financial Institutions

[Loren Ver]

So I was rolling over DH HSA from a terrible provider to Fidelity, and Fidelity wanted to know about job title and job address etc.  DH and I are now FIREd so there is no job title or job address.  I went ahead and typed in Retired and put our home address in the required fields.

This got me wondering, what do retired people put in these fields (RE or Traditional retirees)?
Do people go back and update these fields for accounts they set up while working?
Does what you put actually matter?  I'm not sure why they ask, since it doesn't involve an income verification.
Thoughts?   I don't want to put anything that will cause us grief in the future (people take things involving money very seriously) but I also like to be accurate albeit whimsical. 

Loren

[terran]

I'm pretty sure they ask for regulatory reasons. Isn't this the same section that asks if you're an officer in a publicly traded company, or work in the securities industry? I think there's also some kind of "know your customer" law that bank and maybe other financial institutions are supposed to follow for money laundering reasons.

[habanero]

In general, there are certain jobs / positions which requires extra scrutiny from whoever is providing you financial services. Its debatable how efficient some self-declerance of job title is in that respect anyway so my best educated guess is that they want it for internal statistics and also it might tell them a little about how interesting a customer you are likely to be and consequently if they should bother trying to sell you more stuff.

As a side note one of the most efficient ways to end any conversation from someone pitching an investment idea to you is to say that you work for an investment bank / a securities firm / a fund manager or similar.

[Loren Ver]

Thank you for the replies.  I was thinking it wasn't particularly binding, but wanted a double check.  Not too worried about going to my older accounts and making changes.

[jim555]

I put retired.

[Cannot Wait!]

I put Property Manager. 

[Loren Ver]

Fidelity had me update my job info and I said “retired.” A week ago, I got an invitation (in the mailbox) to a Fidelity retirement planning seminar :(

So it sounds like a marketing thing...

Maybe they will pay you to give a talk :)