I switched jobs back in January and intimated my 401k transfer to my new plan back in March. There were several issues with the paper work that I cleared up, primarily about who to make the checks out to.
Fast forward 10 calls, multiple faxes and pure rage, the process is still not complete and will be calling today to figure out why it’s still pending. The last conversation I had with customer service was a confirmation that all was resolved and they would be sending my checks to my new employers plan.
At this point, I want vengeance. This process has been pure incompetence by my previous employer’s plan servicer, every call led to a new “ticket” or some other rogue confirmation that they already had. Who do I file a complaint with? Keep in mind, my 401k allocation is 100% treasures, which has had an incredible year so this is more than just an annoyance compliant, i lost money here.
Where did the delay actually occur? It sounds like it was your former employer’s HR department taking their sweet time filing the proper paperwork with your old plan (specifically the record-keeper). I would be very surprised if the delay was caused by the record-keeper, especially if they’re fairly large. For example, if Fidelity ran your last 401k plan, they’re not sitting on your assets and just goofing off.
So, if I’m near the mark, you’d want to call up your former employer’s HR person in charge of the plan relationship and yell and him/her.
The administrators of these things tend to be ultra incompetent/inefficient, I’ve been thu all this crap before, rage.
Say you inherit a 401k at a market peak, you feel a crash is coming, you order them to liquidate everything, but they take many many months of paperwork and bs delays, when they finally liquidate on some random day it’s during the crash and you receive 70% of what you should have (by snail mail check, which means you can’t even reinvest during the crash).
I much prefer to keep all funds in my own broker account, so I can do what I want without these idiots in my way, don’t care of there is a tax penalty for withdraw.
The ticket is to go to your current record keeper and get them to deal with the transfer. More than likely they will get paid on assets so it’s in their interest to get the assets in your previous employer’s plan over to your new one quickly.
Same thing goes for any other account type that you’re trying to transfer - go to the provider you want the assets with and get them to handle it.
^ Called the administrator of my current plan on Friday. After a few minutes of explaining what has happened, the amount of the 401k transfer etc, the person I was speaking to realized that I was the owner of several checks they received a few weeks ago that did not have a name on it. Can you believe this garbage?
So long story short, they tried to transfer money over to my new custodian without my name on it. I vaguely remember the person helping me with the transfer saying something about how it was going to be difficult to fit my name and the custodian on the check. Can’t not believe they felt it was okay just to leave my name off.
So everything will be settled by Friday but I’m going to explore calling the State Attorney’s office to file a complaint.
As an aside, I don’t think being 100% bonds is a good pension strategy unless you are aged 60+ and even then I would question it. Your long-term expected return is <2%. Possibly <1% depending on duration etc. Much better to be 100% equities or other risk assets with expected return of 5%+.
^ Who’s to say that OP doesn’t have a large sum of money in other accounts and that this 401k is only 1% of his assets, with the remaining being invested in Equities, etc?