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Archive for March, 2011

I need a little advice

March 18th, 2011 at 05:52 pm

I haven't posted anything in a couple of months. Nothing much new going on. I'm progressing pretty well with my goals for the year. I will make a separate post about my goals.

Anyways I have a little mutual fund problem that I would appreciate advice on. I have two mutual funds that I originally purchased from an investment broker
in the 1990's. I was happy with them for a long time and the paperwork involved was pretty simple.

Then with various stock market crashes and the recession and so on my mutual funds depreciated a lot and also somehow became more complicated. They snuck in a maintenence fee. Due to my slacker ways I barely noticed. I did call them to find out what was going on but they just insisted that i always had paid the fees. Now I just found out that the fees only started in 2009. They also passed my funds through to several different investment companies. I called the guy that I thought was my broker and it turns out that he didn't want to handle my account anymore so he had turned it over to their Customer Service Team. I spoke with them finally the other day because i had a tax question and actually it
the first time that the brokers seemed to give me any straight answers to my questions. So I think the fact that my old broker didn't weant my account was a good thing.
But the problem still is that the company charges me a maintenace fee of $60 a year and this year its going up to $85. My Mutual Funds are just starting to recover from all the bad things that have happened over the years but are basically pretty close to what
the original base was. I'm thinking of closing it all up completely. That would elimate the fees the brokerage firm that hasn't done much of anything for me. I am thinking of putting the money into Vanguard because that seems to be the most highly praised Mutual Fund company from people on Savings Advice.

So does that seem like a good idea or what should I do? And what Vanguard fund (or any other fund) would you recommend? Its not an IRA. I had Growth and Income Mutual Funds.

Thanks in advance. And I'm sorry if this post was pretty boring to read. I really could use the advice. Especially for the best Vanguard fund to look into.