OK, I emailed my congresscritter. No response yet…BUT
My payment aggreement seems to be working now. I finally saw the autopayment leave my account. And AND…I called the IRS again becasue I still can’t access the online account…
and I have been on hold for 20 minutes! It did not tell me they could help me today and call back another time!
Ameriprise. Fucking idiots!
Ok, if you have dealt with this company you know what I am talking about. But I’ll explain. A few decades ago some agent talked my dad into opening an annuity account. Dad funded it with about $4K and then decided to forget about it and stop dealing with these jerks (a good idea). Fast forward to a couple of years ago and I am helping my parents with their estate plan. I ask my dad about the account and all he says is “those sons of bitches” and won’t say any more. I read the statements and letters to try to figure out what he has. The account has grown to a modest sum and has not been annuitized, but I can’t tell if it’s a qualified plan or not, stuff like that. Ok, so at least I am aware of the account, even if dad doesn’t want to deal with it. Fast forward to this year. Dad is in a nursing home with dementia. Mom passes soon after. But the estate plan is solid, and I have power of attorney for dad’s accounts. So I attempt to figure out how to send the POA documents to Ameriprise. First I contact the local Ameriprise representative but he is not in the office so I opt to send him an email. Now this is in a different town from my dad (I live 350 miles away) but I figure he could point me in the right direction. Which he probably could if he bothered to reply to my email. So I look at the Ameriprise website. Forms available online seem to be for a financial professional, so I call and ask what I needed to send in. They said to just send in the POA documents and a copy of my ID, no form required. Ok, so I mail that to them. And wait. No response from them for a month. So I call and ask what’s up, and they said that they needed a form. The 22 page form that was for up to five people to be given authority to act on this account, and the same form that looks to be for financial professionals. They want it faxed to them (when you deal with a company that insists on fax and claims they can’t accept a email attachment of a scanned document PDF, that’s a warning sign). Oh, and a statement from his doctor. So I print out 22 pages of this form, fill out 3 pages and leave the rest blank, attach the letter from his doctor stating dad is incapacitated, and fax the entire pile of paper to them. And wait. After two weeks I hear nothing from them. So I call and ask what’s up? They said that documents are mailed out and that it usually takes 10 to 14 days. For mail. First class mail. Sure. So I give them one more week and nothing arrives. I call them, ask them to send it again, and ensure that they have my correct address, which they do. They mail it again, saying it should be faster this time, 5 to 7 days. Two weeks go by and nothing in the mail.
Fuck it, I have had enough of this bullshit. I call one more time and ask them to either email it to me or FedEx it to me, but I need the paperwork to access the account now. They will do neither, but will mail it again. Again, I ask if they have the right address for me. At this point they inform me that they will only mail the documents to my dad, at his address, which is now a vacant house 350 miles away from me*. Despite sending in every fucking legal document that gives me POA on the account, they won’t communicate directly to me and have been mailing documents meant for me to my dad. Who they know is incapacitated with dementia. Fucking idiots!
My Wife inherited an account with them. All we’ve had to do so far is get information for taxes (it loses me money) and there is a CPA in their building that can do our taxes with the booklet they send us each year.
Someone keeps telling the post office that my mother has either moved without forwarding address or is temporarily absent. The post office will not let her look at these notices to see if she can figure out the writing. They will not tell her anything about them. So she has been spending an hour a day calling utilities, medical insurance companies, her bank, etc because she’s not getting bills and notices. She was in tears this morning, as due to a delay in receiving her medical insurance bill, she was cut off. She managed to get it resolved, but she is over it all. I received a call from the power company at the cabin - the bill was returned and they had her old phone number. Her job today is to sit down and write out what all bills she receives and when every month (some are monthly, some are every other month, some semi-annually) and match up with her checkbook to see when last paid - basically devise a chart to know what to expect and when, so when she doesn’t get the bill, she can be proactive.
Unfortunately, she is tech adverse and will not have bills emailed or pay any bills online.
I did also sign up for Informed Delivery from the post office, but if things are being returned automatically, I don’t know what good it will do. I just really want to know who is doing this to an old lady.
I almost hesitate to ask, but could you report it to the police as possible harassment? They might be able to get more out of the PO, or to get the PO to hold any further requests.
My intent is to either withdraw the funds or transfer to his IRA (at another institution), depending on the type of funds. But your post reminds me that the first thing I should do is see if any beneficiary is listed. This account was opened long before my parents started any estate planning.
If the local Post Office won’t fix this, I suggest reporting it directly to the postal inspector service. At the very least, someone is erroneously redirecting the mail, or it might be more serious.
Based on my experience with the local post office, I’m suspecting pure incompetence on the part of the staff. I second the suggestion to report it to the postal inspector.
Can you transfer it to his IRA without causing a tax problem? When I see the account lose a lot of money, I want to sell this puppy, buy gold and bury it in the back yard, but that would kill our income tax return.
That’s what I meant when talking about the type of funds. If it is qualified, then I should be able to roll it to his IRA. If it is not, then cashing out the account will very likely create a tax liability. While it’s enough money to be worth worrying about, it’s not enough to create a huge tax bill or bump up to a significantly higher marginal rate. If I can’t figure it out, I know a financial advisor in town that works at an hourly rate, plus a CPA that does the taxes for my dad. The rules for qualified accounts and inherited accounts can be complicated, so I won’t do it without advice if I am not certain about it. But if the beneficiaries are not set up correctly, then I would rather take the funds from Ameriprise now while dad is alive rather than have to open a probate just to deal with Ameriprise later.
It doesn’t even have to be that (at least not at a local facility). Each processing plant gets its list of address changes uploaded to the sorting systems weekly. It’s my understanding that the upload originated from a single location in the U. S. A mis-keying of an actual notification into the system (possibly related to unreadable handwriting) might have resulted in her physical address being purged entirely.
Not the rant - My daughter is autistic.
Rant - We found out today that she’d be getting a diagnosis and my brain cannot do anything else right now. I’m at work, I’m filling out the last questionnaire before the parent feedback meeting and I am NOT doing work. Everything in my brain is just thinking about autism and my daughter. This was not unexpected. We’ve been working toward this for about 7 months now. I need to do other things.
At least I’m not crying.
(((slalexan)))
That does sound like a better go-to than the police.
FML - for lots of reasons, really. I’ll just share this one: I just opened the car to bring the groceries inside. 2 6-packs of beer promptly dropped onto the driveway. I had 5 casualties. I think I’ve got all of the glass picked up, the front yard smells like beer, and I don’t know when I’ll be able to open any of the remaining bottles without getting sprayed. This moment is emblematic of my entire life.
You can’t handle your beer?
yes.
The stupidity of automated filters… a game I’m now playing turned “braids” into “br****”. Really? :smack:
The same game, which is “play to pretty”, doesn’t want to take my money because apparently they’ve flagged me as a possible money launderer. They claim this is in application of US laws but won’t provide the references. I’m not a US citizen, national or tax resident; the company is not in the US; they started by requesting full scans of my ID and CC (EEEK!) and when I said “no fucking way” turned it into “well, we only need [these pieces]”. Yeah, kiss my ass. Your game is pretty, but your so-called security folks seem to be about as good at security as I am at pole vaulting.
How old is she and how bad does it seem to be? The bad news is, she’s autistic. The middle news is, that’s actually a pretty wide diagnosis, kind of like “she needs glasses” in that this one covers a ton of people ranging from “can’t count her own fingers without her glasses” to “really should put them on when driving on unknown roads”. The good news is, having a diagnosis means it’ll lbe easier to get access to help.
We don’t know just yet. The ADOS test we did, plus the surveys I had to fill out, will assign her a level 1 through 3 that will describe the amount of support she needs, level 1 being the lowest amount needed and level 3 being the highest. The psychiatrist thinks she’ll be around a level 2, based on how good a lot of her adaptive skills are with adults but her complete lack of skills when dealing with other children.
The best news we have is that she has responded really well to speech and occupational therapies. It seems that we are in a good position to get her all the skills she’ll need to be successful. But it’s a lot. And I live in the US so we get to pay for all this. And it’s expensive.
My husband is still in denial. He’s upset because, instead of saying “your child meets the criteria for autism” the psychiatrist said “I think your child meets the criteria for autism.” I tried to explain to him that she wouldn’t even say that if she wasn’t actually sure and that women, myself included, often to try to soften the blow of their professional judgement when giving bad news.
I’m just trying to remember that our child is different, not less. She really is a sweet kid and so very smart. This didn’t change her. It’s not the end of the world. It is not a death sentence. But my brain is being dumb.
slalexan, I wish with all of my heart that our eldest had had a full autism evaluation at a young age like yours is getting. He was diagnosed at 11, after his younger brother (then 7, now 11) was. The differences in their development, which I attribute mostly to the support and services the younger is getting in school, are amazing. Mine are both level 1. I sometimes despair of the elder ever living successfully on his own, but I am very confident about the younger. It is expensive and stressful, but you are doing the absolute best things you can for her.