If you have brokerage accounts with Vanguard, you may have received an email with the somewhat vague subject line “The fee policy is changing for brokerage accounts”. Whenever fees goes down, the subject line is usually “WE SAVED YOU MONEY BY DROPPING THIS FEE!! 🎉🎉🎉” Whenever fees goes up, it’s “btw we made some changes”. So you can guess what this means.
The new policy is that all Vanguard brokerage accounts have a $20 annual fee, unless you have any one of the following:
- You have elected e-delivery of statements and the annual privacy policy notice; confirmations; reports, prospectuses, and proxy materials; and notices, amendments, and other important account updates,
- Your brokerage accounts are enrolled in an advisory program serviced by an affiliate of Vanguard,
- You have at least $1 million in qualifying Vanguard assets, or
- You are a client who has an organization or a trust account registered under an employee identification number (EIN).
To my knowledge, the $20 annual fee used to be waived for accounts with at least $10,000 in assets. Basically, Vanguard has effectively added a paper statement fee to anyone with less than $1,000,000 in assets. That’s quite a big change in the number of affected customers. You can still elect to receive paper tax forms for no fee.
I don’t mind stopping monthly paper statements, especially since Vanguard does a good job of collecting everything from the past quarter onto their quarterly statements (and past year on their end-of-year statements). The March statement contains all the transactions for January through March, and so on. I’m also happy to receive electronic versions of prospectuses and such, those thick booklets add up to a lot of paper.
However, I do like having an annual paper statement and it would be nice if they still offered that option for free for those with $10,000+ in assets. That’s already reducing the amount of paper mailings by over 90%. Having dealt with estate issues, it’s just nice to have any sort of physical paper trail when searching for accounts. I always say that I’ll collect my monthly e-statements and manually print out a year-end for every single financial account for physical storage, but in reality I don’t.
Note: This fee is for Vanguard brokerage accounts. Vanguard mutual fund accounts also have their own new $20 fee, which is $20 for EACH Vanguard mutual fund (waived with at least $1 million in qualifying Vanguard assets). Vanguard really wants to you convert your mutual fund accounts to a brokerage account. (My opinion is that the conversion wasn’t that bad at all, but these days anything that might force a customer service interaction with Vanguard means a possible 1-hour phone hold time. 👎)
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This day in age, I have no idea why anyone would use paper statements for anything.
How about for those times when companies tell you they save your statements forever and then limit access to say 1-year retention and you need that statement they can no longer provide? Everything is always promised and it’s easy to change.
I download all my PDF statements and keep them in an encrypted container. No need for paper or to rely on the company keeping them available.
I have a more extreme situation for retaining paper statements. I had a mutual fund account back in the 1990s for several years before I closed it. The fund no longer is available. Several years ago, the Fund was sued for incorrect fee charges when it was operating. Since I was a shareholder during the time period in question, I could file for a class action lawsuit to get compensated. In order to do so, I had to provide documentation to prove that I was a shareholder during the time in question. I kept all of the fund paper statements from the 1990s and sent copies of them along with lawsuit form to the court appointed legal firm. Since I moved the fund balance to other company, I also had to show the transfer of the fund balance to the other account in order to properly identify where the lawsuit payment should be directed to. I also had that paper statement to send to them. All of the paper statements were dated from over 20 years ago (before the internet use became more common).
Have not received this email yet. Does it say anything about individual 401k? They do not allow opt out of paper statements for those accounts, so in effect they would be adding $20 fee to i401k. Been thinking of transferring to etrade, but etrade tanked it making the transfer process overly convoluted & careless customer service in that department.
It is comforting to get the paper statements to make sure they don’t get lost in the sea of unwanted e-mails
I got this email as well. Fortunately I decided to use Merrill as my brokerage instead, and there I have a personal rep available via email and he’s been very responsive to my questions and service requests.
I should probably double check that I won’t get caught up by this, even though I turned on electronic, maybe some stuff is still paper that I need to change…
I’ve been on paperless for over 5 years now, so it’s a non-issue. IMHO, paperless is the only way to go.
IMHO if you need a hard copy of a tax form, printing it once a year is not a big deal.
I’m confused. I thought Vanguard made such an announcement many years ago (at least five or so?) and I changed to paperless at that time to avoid the fee. Did I make that change earlier than I had to? Or is this something different somehow that I’m missing entirely?
Found the answer to my own question searching the Bogleheads forum. Apparently what had prompted me to switch many years ago was a similar fee that only applied to funds with less than a $10k balance. Oh well, I didn’t need the paper statements all this time anyway. All of my past statements are downloaded and saved in an encrypted container instead of taking up space in a file drawer somewhere.
“I don’t mind stopping monthly paper statements, especially since Vanguard does a good job of collecting everything from the past quarter onto their quarterly statements”
Jonathan, are you saying that quarterly paper statements will still be free?
No, just saying that there are other possible options for people who want occasional paper statements but don’t need 12 statements a year. A quarterly-only or annual-only option would be nice. I’d pick it even if it didn’t save me any money.
Sun spots and/or electronic pulse attacks can wipe out all your electronic copies.
People with a million dollars get paper. This is bad karma.
Been a loyal Vanguard fan for over 32 years; All my many funds were Vanguard funds…a regular buyer! My portfolio grew to 783000.00 before our recent financial crisis. I am 81 years old now. I look forward to my written statements,,,comparing them with prior ones; making changes as I see a need…while sipping an occasional martini,,,and now…feeling very Sad Vanguard has let me down…during a time when our portfolios value has dropped! (A double Hit!)
A late addition:
You note that Vanguard is forcing customers to change mutual fund accounts to brokerage accounts, to avoid other fees. I did that change in mid-2022, then got the notice that I needed to go paperless to avoid the statement fee.
I downloaded my 2022 end-of-year brokerage statement to print and keep for basis calculations when I sell my investments years from now and the information is no longer available on the website.
I see that the end-of-year statement doesn’t actually include any transactions from the first 3 quarters.
This wasn’t the case with my Vanguard mutual fund account statements. Previous year’s statements were truly “year-to-date”. If I want to keep the basis information I’ll now need to download and print everything.
Look’s like Vanguard is slipping badly in customer service.
I had pretty much the same thing happen. My experience with Vanguard customer service has been uniformly negative.
IMO, you are just as likely to get electronically hacked and have your personal information stolen as you are to have someone go through your mailbox and steal your mail. The exposure to theft of personal information via email/electronic delivery is a concern.