It’s been a month since we started consolidating all these small 401(k) plans, IRA plans, etc into one account, and to date TWO out of six have shown up in the destination accounts. We’re not talking a fortune here, but you would think we were raiding an offshore account for millions. How fucking hard is it to cut a goddamned check and to follow the explicit instructions I sent you fucking fucks? They either make out the check to me, in which case the target account rejects it, or they don’t send the goddamn form that we enclosed that the target account REFUCKINGQUIRESYOUFUCKING DOUCHEBAGS, and it’s rejected, or some other clusterfuck comes up such as telling us that the plan manager has to fill out the form. That’s YOU, you fucking buttcrack-smelling motherfuckers!
A word of advice to my fellow Dopers: whenever you leave a job where you were contributing to a retirement plan, make sure that when you open your new retirement plan at your next employer, that you get the money rolled over. If you’re looking at retirement in a few years and plan to consolidate several plans, start now, because these fucking ass monkeys will fuck up an anvil given half a chance and a ballpeen hammer.
You don’t have any funds locked up in a certificate that needs to mature first, do you?
That being said, I fully endorse this pitting. I was the IRA adminstrator at my old job, and if I had a dollar for every time a rollover got screwed up I wouldn’t be going to work tomorrow. The really fun ones were where they would try to wire the funds to the customer’s account. One wrong digit anywhere and the money is bouncing around in cyberspace. And we had some funky wiring instructions. The money had to go through our processing account, then through a corporate account, then finally to the customer. The corporate account step got skipped more often than not.
Vanguard fucked it up, as did TD Ameritrade (the administrator for a corporate plan). Fidelity was pretty helpful. State of Alaska fucked it up (or their plan administrator). Smith Barney is hopeless (they finally cut the check and left $.01 in the account ), and we’re waiting for the other shoe to drop with Citi. How goddamned hard can this be? They must do this sort of thing every day of every week, but can’t get it straight? The sticking point is almost always that they neglect to send the Thrift Savings Plan form that TSP requires. We sent the form to them all, along with the instructions, but some of them seem to think it’s beneath them to fill the fucking thing out. I told the guy at Ameritrade: You’re refusal to do your job is costing me money, pal. I got a phone call ten minutes later from a supervisor telling me that they would take care of it.
During the Band Aid / Live Aid period, when he and the more traditional charity / relief organizations were arranging for funds to send to Somalia, the future knight of the empire got impatient with the endless list of names and places one can deposit his funds to help in the cause. He grabbed the mike and said “Just send the fucking money! We’ll get it there!”
Today my wife called one of her investment management offices, located in Colorado, and told them that they needed to send the government form to the government, as the check would be returned. The Colorado office tells her (even though they have the form scanned into her file and is looking at it while they’re conversing): you have to call our office in Anchorage. Okay, what’s that number. I don’t know, but I’ll connect you to our San Francisco office :rolleyes:. SF gives her the Anchorage number. She gets a flunky on the phone, who, instead of transferring her right away to someone with a brain, listens to the entire spiel and then transfers her :rolleyes::rolleyes:. The next person claims not to see that form anywhere, until my wife tells them: TSP has the check. If they don’t get that form, it’s going to be returned to you, and in the meantime my money is floating around out there not making me a penny in interest. “Oh, wait, now I see it here. Well, we could fill that out, I guess, and fax it to TSP.” :rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes: You mean like I told you to do in the first fucking place? :mad:
More to the point, their refusal to do their job competently is MAKING them money, or at least not costing them any. The longer they hold on to it, the more chance generic customer might say, “screw it, I’ll just leave it there until I die / retire / whatever.”
The check will be returned because they will forget to put one of the new cover sheets on the TPS report. Not the old, one, but the new one, that is specified in form 345-65.8
So then they’ll have to file a correcting document on form 456.34-99, with it’s accompanying cover sheet.
My next phone conversation: Peter! How’s it goin’, yeaahhh, I’m going to have to have you go ahead and submit that TSP form again, since you didn’t fill out Part II. Did you get the letter telling you to do that, because it was a recent change to your normally inept methods and I’m thinkin’ that you probably just went ahead and ignored that requirement. So. . .could you go ahead and make sure that you take care of that for me? That’d be greeaaat.
I buy one house, then a second, then a third, then spend the requisite money to place a hotel, instead of buying the fourth house and placing it then removing them all from the board and paying the money for the hotel and placing it.
The colours even match.
In at least one instance of gameplay, I have also had the player upon whose property I unfortunately landed proclaim
6 months ago I sent a request to my bank to transfer an RRSP from a holding account where it’s earning basically nothing but is sheltered from tax to an actual investment account. 1 month later I sent an inquiry asking why it hadn’t been transferred and followed up with another transfer request. 2 weeks after that I followed up again and was told I needed to resubmit the request again. After they lost the 3rd set of forms I filled out the 4th set, went to the bank and sat in an office until they processed them before I would leave. Time spent in office - 3 hours. Relief at leaving incompetent bank - minor cause I’m afraid they’re all the same.
Last time I tried to do a 401k rollover the destination company lost the check. Where’d it go? No idea. So I had to send them another one. Cancelled the first one. Then what happens?
They deposit the first one, which magically appeared. And despite my cancelling it, it still hit my account. The bank fixed that (since I had cancelled it, after all.)
That, of course, caused the ACH transaction from the original check to be reversed, which caused the destination 401k to put an alert on my account for fraud.
), and we’re waiting for the other shoe to drop with Citi. How goddamned hard can this be? They must do this sort of thing every day of every week, but can’t get it straight? The sticking point is almost always that they neglect to send the Thrift Savings Plan form that TSP requires. We sent the form to them all, along with the instructions, but some of them seem to think it’s beneath them to fill the fucking thing out. I told the guy at Ameritrade: You’re refusal to do your job is costing me money, pal. I got a phone call ten minutes later from a supervisor telling me that they would take care of it.