This is exactly what I did, per my financial advisor’s advice. A smart move.
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Woo, this discussion of rollovers is giving me PTSD about mine. My employer’s cheesy 401(k) company wouldn’t do electronic transfer, or at least their online system was too crummily-designed to work properly, so we had to do it with checks via snail mail. Waiting for those huge paper checks in the mail was nail-biting and I had knots in my stomach until I physically handed them over to the people at Schwab the next Monday.
I’m glad everyone’s experience with electronic transfer is working out well.
7 months retired as of now. My 401k was already with Fidelity and have nothing but good things to say about my advisor. They’ve treated me well.
T
I’m 57. I retired from my earlier job in March of this year. I had a 401K at this job, and it’s now at $2.2M in TIAA-CREF accounts. My current job has a “Thrift Savings Plan.” I have absolutely no idea what’s the best thing to do at this point, retirement-wise. I have a meeting with a TIAA rep next month, because someone told me I need to transfer some of my mutual funds into more conservative investments.
If you stick around the Fed job until you are 62 and have 5 years of service, you’ll have FEHB benefits for life (with the Govt picking up 75% of the cost). Probably the biggest (or only) perk of having a Fed job at this point. Make sure you know the requirements for a federal retirement.
As for the change in asset allocation (shifting to more conservative investments), I doubt you ‘need’ to do anything. You may want to do something, but don’t need to.
There was a recent thread about the value of Financial Advisors recently, in case you missed it. Beware of high fees. Hell, beware of all fees.
@teelabrown may enjoy some schadenfreud here.
Upthread I mentioned the block of 401k funds I’d had in a non-tradeable non-transferable fund. Which the 401k holder was going to automatically liquidate to cash & forward easily & quickly.
Wrong. Oh so Wrong.
In fact the untransferable funds will sit there until forever. Unless I sell them. Or so says the second message I got from them which directly contradicts the first message I’d been relying on.
So I tried to sell them. “No can do” says the website: “Your account is locked. Call 1-800-eat-sh**”.
After some major hold time delay since this is the end of the year and everyone who failed to plan ahead is calling in now, I talk to C/S. The account is frozen since a transfer to another brokerage is in progress. But as long as those funds are trapped, the transfer will never complete and the account will never unfreeze. Catch-22!
After 4 escalations ever further into the IT dwarves’ inner circle they explain they can issue a waiver to enable the sale to cash of the untransferrable assets. Which process runs overnight. On Fri night.
So on Mon I should come back and order the sale and it’ll go through. It’s now late on Fri, but hooray, at least we understand the situation. Silly, but logical in a sense. Yaay!
Fast forward to Mon. Due to reasons I call them just past 4:30pm eastern, after the market has closed. Explain yet again the whole story since the C/S workers’ notes to one another are a useless convoluted mess. Get elevated twice. Finally get a guy with a clue who says (after a 10 minute sidebar with somebody while I listen to hold music) “I have authorization to force those trades through. Since it’s a mutual fund they’ll execute at the end of the trading day tomorrow = Christmas eve at 1330.”
Hooray - I think. 
To boot, you might recall at the outset I said I’d transferred the bulk of the assets in kind a few days ago. Easy peasy. And indeed it was. But this morning I received a bunch of dividends on those now-transferred assets. Which arrived in kind in my old accounts. And will need yet another transfer-in-kind effort to move.
Oh yeah, one more thing. The great bulk of my old-account assets that departed in kind overnight on Wed-> Thu for my new accounts? Still utterly lost in space on Mon. Whether they show up on Tue morning must await the coming dawn.
Color me unimpressed.
And now my mess is settling down. 
The bulk of the Roth funds appeared in my receiving IRA overnight the 23rd/24th. And in a welcome Christmas present, the bulk of the traditional (non-Roth) funds appeared overnight on the 24th/25th. And the nontransferable funds did sell within both the old IRAs at close of day on the 24th.
So right now no money is lost in space. The old accounts still hold the soon-to-be-settled cash proceeds from the nontransferable fund sales, plus the small amount of dividends in kind of the transferable funds. With luck come the 26th or 27th that stuff will all transfer out.
Whew!
A welcome holiday present!
I have what may be a dumb question, but I see all the discussion of rolling over to Roth IRAs & moving off platforms…what necessitates that? I’m only asking because my company kept everything on Fidelity, so the 401K and everything else is just there where I can already get at it.
You can leave it all in the 401k after you retire (but can no longer contribute to it). In my case I had a mix of 401k, various savings accounts, and four different IRAs (none of it with Fidelity).
My advisor suggested I consolidate and gave me options as to where to put it. I asked what he used for himself and he said Fidelity, so that’s where I went.
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Lots of companies use crappy platforms for 401ks with high fees and few investment choices. The sooner you pry your money out of their clutches the better. For you, not them.
Even if your employer uses a quality brokerage for their 401 custodian, they may still have somewhat limited options on how you can invest the money within the 401k. But you could open an IRA at that same provider, roll your 401k money into the new IRA, then invest without having to select only from their limited menu of 401k-able funds. And perhaps stop paying some 401k management fees to boot.
If you have material amounts of assets at a brokerage other than the one your employer picked for the 401k without asking you, it can be helpful to consolidate everything at one place just for ease of management. If you like your 401k provider more than your other brokerage you could bring your other money over to new conventional or IRA accounts where your 401k is already sitting.
In my case I preferred the platform I was already on, so I moved the 401K money to there. Not out of any unhappiness w Fidelity or my available investment choices there, but solely for the convenience value of consolidation.
All the above is written from the POV of someone who just retired. If you’re still mid-career but have changed jobs a few times, you might have four or six 401ks, each at different vendors with different fees, investment choices, etc. Combining all those old accounts into either your current 401k, or into an IRA is smart. Money left lying around at companies you’ve forgotten you ever worked for is a great way to misplace and eventually lose a bunch of your assets.
Yeah, this happened to me, too. They stayed in my company’s 401(k) account for many months. I had been ignoring mailings from the old 401(k) place because I thought they were just robo-generated crap that contained nothing that applied to me anymore. Finally I thought to go back and check (after hunting down my old passwords etc.), and I had over $2,900 in my old account! I had them just distribute it to me as a payment, rather than rolling that bit over, because it wasn’t big enough to get excited about.
I’m glad everything’s working out. At least we only ever have to do this once in a lifetime, right?
Every time you change jobs. Including the final time from working to not working. For someone like you who worked for one company most of your career it’s easy. Over the decades I’ve had about six 401k providers. Other folks have had 20.
A previous employer used Vanguard to manage its 401(k) plans. When I RIF’d in 2008 (they called it “retirement” by some skewed logic involving the Rule of 55) I was informed that I had to move my balance to an individual IRA. I could have moved it to Fidelity or some other company at that time, but since experience has taught me that any major financial move I make will be dead wrong, I left it with them. I haven’t been displeased.
My two cents, to agree with what @LSLGuy and @Mean_Mr.Mustard said:
My 401k provider had a limited number of investment choices, and they were all mutual funds of various flavors. It made sense for me to roll it into an IRA at Fidelity where virtually every investment choice is available. Plus I could roll my small Vanguard IRA into the same IRA at Fidelity.
Obviously, what was good for me may not be the best choice for you. I sought counsel from three guys who, now retired, all managed a lot of money during their careers. Those three, independent of each other, all gave me the same advice: Fidelity.
I will add that Fidelity has pretty much the best phone support I’ve ever encountered. I have used it several times.
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Thank to everyone for their responses. Fidelity is actually the manager of my two largest 401Ks, plus my pensions (not by my design, that’s just how it went), so that’s to the good…though I also put some other stuff in Vanguard just to diversify location a little.
Let me say at the outset that this is not a response to the last post by @Maserschmidt, but the comment of ‘diversify location’ reminded me of something that a professional money manager told me a long time ago.
I had a smallish IRA at Principal in a Large Cap mutual fund. In my 401k, part of my investment was in a Vanguard Large Cap fund. Larry, the money manager, told me to look at the holdings of each of these funds. I was surprised (although I shouldn’t have been) to discover that there were many duplicated holdings in these two funds. Thus, if I wanted to diversify, that wasn’t the way to do it.
Food for thought, and hopefully most of you are smarter than I was back then.
Yeah. That form of diversification doesn’t work. One vendor’s e.g. “large cap growth” fund is necessarily going to be all but interchangeable with another vendor’s “large cap growth” fund. At least as to holdings if not as to fees.
But there might be some value to the concern that e.g. Fidelity the company, not the funds, and not the stocks in those funds, might have a meltdown or IT disaster or whatever. So that although your underlying assets are intact, nobody can get to them. So having, say, half at Fidelity and half at Vanguard would be very unlikely to leave you unable to access enough of your money to get by until whatever disaster befell one of them was overcome.
My own view of that is the hassle isn’t worth it for the incremental protection against a very unlikely event. Rest assured the Feds would be real interested in ensuring e.g. Fidelity got back in motion real quickly.
My own answer to that problem is to retain enough cash in a national bank and enough free credit from several distinct issuers to be able to ride through any disruption in access to all my assets at my one and only brokerage. If somehow those assets were stolen or destroyed never to be recovered I’d be broke. But that’s not the risk I’m guarding against.
Well, not to go into a ton of detail (which I just deleted), but Fidelity is un-transparent in the way it manages some things, and I started on Vanguard because I was annoyed. I buy very specific things there (e.g. municipal bonds, t-bills), but I won’t argue that there’s little or no diversification benefit.