Consolidate, Simply, Improve Your Finances

I have been helping a family member wrap her arms around her financial situation recently and thought I'd share my observations. Unlike the typical situation these days she has judicially salted away money every month for a very long time and therefore won't be wondering if she can maintain her lifestyle in retirement. But, her husband ran into some health issues two years ago and she had to take the reins of their finances for the first time in 20+ years. In their family, her accountant husband had a mind for numbers and had invested money with 15+ mutual fund companies, opening one or two funds at each. This caused paperwork nightmare for someone who is financially savvy, let alone someone who has problems balancing the checkbook.

The health situation opened her eyes and woke her up to the fact that if something happened again she wasn't sure she would even know where all their money was. Of course, having 20 different mutual funds doesn't mean you are diversified. It's also a huge hassle. I've been enlisted to help them consolidate their accounts, re-balance and simply things. They are also looking into working with a financial planner. I'm admittedly not an expert on equities, bonds, and the like, but as the financial meltdown of 2008-2009 has shown, neither are most of the people on Wall Street. I'll list the steps I have taken below. They want to take a mostly DIY approach to their investments so I've tried to not make things overly complicated while bringing their risk down.

STEP ONE. CONSOLIDATE

As noted above, my relatives had holdings at over 15 institutions. While they had some real quality companies working for them, I question whether each of the offerings at T.Rowe Price, Vanguard, and Schwab have significant enough differences to spread your money around everywhere. This is especially true with the number of non-transaction fee funds and ETF's available at most full service discount brokers.

a) Where to consolidate?

This is essentially a personal preference since many of the brokers have similar offerings these days. My personal favorite is Fidelity, though Schwab is a close second. Both have a solid offering of branded no transaction fee funds, charge no annual fee, have relatively low minimums, and charge lower trading fees than many of their competitors. There are cheaper options for trading and lower minimums elsewhere, but these two have very good customer service in my experience which is worth the extra dollar or two on trades (since they are mostly invested in mutual funds).

There are also some very good mutual fund companies such as Vanguard and T.Rowe which basically have a brokerage account tacked on as an afterthought to their fund offerings. Both are great companies, but have thin offerings outside their branded funds.

After laying out the options they have decided to go with Fidelity.

b) Making the Move

One of the reasons that we settled on Fidelity was that quite a few of their funds were part of Fidelity's NTF network, so they could be rolled and moved into the brokerage account essentially unchanged. A number of the other offerings will be liquidated and moved into a similar offerings from the Fidelity branded funds, NTF funds Fidelity offers, or comparable ETF's. The whole process can be initiated online and finalized by mailing some paperwork to Fidelity. It is a fairly pain free process, but takes a little while.

STEP TWO. SIMPLIFY

Asset allocation is the single most important factor in this process and I haven't been able to find any online tools that I feel confident with. This is especially true given the huge differences in allocations each recommended. My relatives are about 5 years from retirement, so they will need a more conservative allocation than someone like me. I have recommended that my relatives visit a financial planner who charges hourly and schedule an appointment to review their goals and get a plan figured out. A few hundred dollars is a small price to pay for solid advice.

STEP THREE. IMPROVE

While things haven't been finished yet. They are off to a good start. The final pieces will fall into place once they meet with the financial planner. I believe they will benefit a great deal from having the vast majority of their investments under one umbrella and just a few funds at another broker. Now, if something happens at least all their money will be in one place and accessible if necessary.

I'm interested to hear if you have had an experience good, bad or otherwise moving things under one roof. Do you have any other advice for them? If so, email me.

Image Credit: Ben30 @ Flickr