I'd drop them like a rock and just invest directly through Fidelity or Vanguard. There's no reason to have a middleman like a bank, especially one that fucks up that badly.
No reason to put up with this, and no guarantee it won't happen again. Switch your investments to a different firm, so you can handle them yourself directly.
Either that, or they have to come up with a real good offer now when you call them up to close your account.
It is a direct investment account, so I do have control over it now and no longer have to deal with anyone else. The trouble was with transferring money from my other bank account.
This bank's investment branch and regular banking branch operate as separate corporations under the same umbrella. The stupidity arose from that supposedly you can use branches of the regular bank to submit things like transfer requests with, so I tried using a local branch. The problem was that though they say you can use a regular branch to submit paperwork like that, it's outside of the common duties of the workers there so it turns out they don't know shit about it. The woman there I got paired with kept submitting things improperly despite the direct investment wing sending instructions with the forms to complete. I would wait for the process to happen, as I was told it could take weeks, and I was busy at work, and then after seeing nothing had happened I had to call and found things like: a field had not been entered correctly by the staffwoman, she had not actually submitted the request, and then again when the manager switched the person handling it to someone else I called again and was told he had never pressed submit at the end of the request form page (though the brqnch manager denied this other guy would make such a stupid mistake, it was never confirmed what went wrong).
Right now my main concern is to get my investments arranged how I wanted to get done months ago. Then I can threaten to leave if I don't get compensated.
They have already tried to set out the defense that it wasn't the investment side's fault, because all the screwups were by the banking side. The banking side deflects and tries to downplay fault by claiming that I could have invested it while waiting for the transfer to happen (this ignores that the money was not in an direct investment account and so I couldn't put it in what I wanted, and implies that I should have assumed they were incompetent), and that I only "think" it cost me money because the market is unpredictable or whatever - which is bullshit because this is retirement savings and as I was delayed for so long I am now buying in at a decently higher price point.
I will talk to the investment side again first. If/when they try to shift blame to the banking side again I will point out that they are the ones that allow the banking side to act in the capacity that they are clearly inept at doing, and threaten to just move my now calibrated investments to another company.
But you guys all agree to otherwise buy in now at current prices? I'm looking at the Vanguard stuff by that couch potato site.
