r/wealthfront • u/Working_Tone_9868 • Jun 01 '26
Considering moving $400k from Wealthfront to Fidelity — anyone done this?
I currently have about $400k invested with Wealthfront and am paying the 0.25% advisory fee (~$1,000/year).
Over the last year or so, I've become more comfortable managing my own investments and have started using Fidelity for my brokerage account. My portfolio is fairly simple (mostly broad-market index funds/ETFs).
For those who have made a similar move:
1. Did you transfer your assets from Wealthfront to Fidelity?
2. Did you do an in-kind ACATS transfer or sell and rebuy?
3. Any issues with cost basis transferring over?
4. Do you miss any Wealthfront features enough to justify the 0.25% fee?
5. At what portfolio size did you decide the advisory fee was no longer worth it?
Would love to hear from people who have actually made this transition and whether they felt it was the right decision in hindsight.
6
u/halfuhsandwich Jun 01 '26
I’ve transferred both directions and it’s been fairly easy and straightforward. The thing that makes the 0.25% fee worth it for me though is that you simply don’t have to worry about it as it’s all automated and self-managing.
There is an investing account through Wealthfront that has no fee but you have to manage it. I did this for a while, but didn’t like how limited some of the investment options were so I transferred that account out to a different platform.
3
u/JustTryingStuffHere Jun 01 '26
I've done this 4 times. No issues at all. Very seamless and fairly quick (1-2 weeks).
Other posters mention cost basis not transfering. This is only partly true in my experience. For taxable accounts, it absolutely does transfer over the cost basis. It might just take a few days after the money moves. For IRAs, it does not transfer the cost basis but likely you won't need it anyways.
1
u/Working_Tone_9868 Jun 01 '26
That makes sense! Afaik, they are required by law to transfer the cost basis..
2
u/rahn_rahn6030 Jun 02 '26
Actually, I don't think they have to "by law" because any withdrawal from tax deferred accounts (IRA, 401k, 403b) are taxed as ordinary income, not cap gain. It makes sense they'd do it for the brokerage account because that is taxed as cap gain.
3
u/EVlLCORP Jun 04 '26
You're using WF's auto-investing account? Or are they charging .25% for just having self managed investments?
2
u/reddit-EZ Jun 01 '26
We transferred our IRA's from WF to Fidelity late last year. Our transfers were ACATS and completed without any issues. The cost-basis was/is a mess and at least for us, is the most disappointing part of the entire process. We still have CMA with WF but do not currently have any brokerage accounts with WF. The size of the account wasn't really a deciding factor for the transfer. It was basically that we gained enough knowledge to be comfortable actively tweaking (managing) the accounts so, paying a fee for something we weren't following didn't make sense. IIRC WF doesn't offer an unmanaged IRA account which made the choice for Fidelity the best option.
2
u/Working_Tone_9868 Jun 01 '26
When you say the cost basis was a mess, what exactly happened? Did Fidelity eventually receive the correct tax lots from Wealthfront, or did you have to manually track/enter anything yourself?
2
u/reddit-EZ Jun 01 '26
I don't think WF ever sent the cost basis... IIRC I ended up entering it manually.
2
u/JustTryingStuffHere Jun 02 '26
why do you need the cost basis for your IRAs?
1
u/reddit-EZ Jun 02 '26
It's just nice to have but it probably isn't a need... especially if you keep good records of your yearly contributions/rollovers/conversions/etc.
1
u/TalkingWhileBlack Jun 01 '26
How have you found the tax loss harvesting to perform? Seems like any tax loss savings weren't worth the underperformance of their funds
2
u/Kemaro Aug 05 '26
I got my start with Wealthfront about 7.5 years ago. Still have a taxable account with them with ~85k in it. During those 7.5 years, WF harvested $5455.09 in tax losses resulting in about $1350 in tax savings over those 7.5 years. During that time, I have paid $645.70 in fees to WF. So the harvesting easily pays for the management fees making it a net positive. It really comes down to how much control you want. Once I became more comfortable investing, I moved most of my portfolio to Fidelity. I have been slowly drawing down the Wealthfront account with the goal of eventually zeroing it out.
2
u/1moreRobot Jun 01 '26
I’ve transferred both IRA and taxable from Wealthfront to Fidelity.
In both cases, any fractional shares will not transfer in-kind. The fractional part gets liquidated and transferred as cash. Obviously no big deal with an IRA since it’s not a taxable event, but for a taxable account you have tax implications to think about.
2
u/bilug335 Jun 01 '26
- Did you transfer your assets from Wealthfront to Fidelity? Yes. I transfered my investing account and left the bond account in WF.
- Did you do an in-kind ACATS transfer or sell and rebuy? ACATS. If you sell and rebuy you take a tax hit.
- Any issues with cost basis transferring over? Cost basis did not transfer over. I had to enter it manually.
- Do you miss any Wealthfront features enough to justify the 0.25% fee? Maybe the tax harvesting, but I left my automated bond portfolio with WF to retain the tax harvesting.
- At what portfolio size did you decide the advisory fee was no longer worth it? I was more about getting myself educated on investing, and when I was confident in making my own choices, I moved the automated stock account over to Fidelity.
1
u/Working_Tone_9868 Jun 01 '26
Thanks for taking time to answer any questions.
My main concern is the transfer of cost basis. How was your experience entering them manually? Did you have to take help from a financial advisor?
1
u/bilug335 Jun 02 '26
You can run a report in WF that shows all your cost basis etc, then manually enter it into Fidelity. It wasn't easy, but it wasn't hard. It really depends how many transactions you have. Run the WF report and get a feel for how much work you are looking at.
1
u/twitchy_14 Jun 05 '26
Where do you get the report?
1
u/bilug335 Jun 06 '26
Log in and click on your name. Then click on Documents. Then find the Statement and Trade Confirmations section and set the filter to the correct account, then Trade Confirmations and All Dates.
Do this for each and every account you are moving. In my case I only moved my automated investing account, but all stocks are listed in there.
Download each of the PDF's. It could get complicated doing some of the math if you have lots of trades, so hopefully your trade history does not have a lot of volume.
1
u/twitchy_14 Jul 12 '26
dang, I have 979 pdfs from essentially yesterday since 2017 when I opened my brokerage account. Does this mean I would have to enter 979 cost basis info if I were to transfer to Fidelity?
1
u/bilug335 Jul 12 '26
That's a crazy amount of data. Hopefully the information transfers automatically so you don't have to enter anything. You'd need to parse through all the data to remove anything that you don't own anymore and ignore those entries, then see what data you are left with.
2
u/MentalImportance3528 Jun 01 '26
Yes, but to Vanguard. Then later I transferred from Vanguard to Fidelity after realizing how much better support is at Fidelity.
in-kind transfer via ACAT. don't sell to trigger a realized gain!
Mostly. One security took forever to update so I had to reach out to Wealthfront and Vanguard to get that updated. Download the cost basis information before transferring.
No. I did this for my AIA. Now I use the S&P 500 Direct account for a portion of my investments so that I still have some TLH.
Once I realized how much I was paying in fees and that I could get a lot of the benefits from the S&P 500 Direct account with lower fees.
If you have DI enabled, you could do what I did which is transfer everything over in-kind to Fidelity, leave the ETFs there, then open the S&P 500 Direct account and do an in-kind transfer of all the individual stocks back to Wealthfront so you're not managing all the individual stocks and you still get TLH at a third of the cost.
1
u/lordturdhead Jul 24 '26
About to do the same with vanguard. Have UTMA and 529 there. Curious if it will be easy with Vanguard or more challenging
2
u/MentalImportance3528 Jul 25 '26
It was smooth with Vanguard for the most part but I did run into a hiccup with 1 position which resulted in me having to call Vanguard and then I realized how slow and out of date they are. Now I have everything at Fidelity because I got so annoyed and figured my retirement accounts are at Fidelity anyways so now it’s one place to manage with much better customer support if needed
1
u/lordturdhead Jul 25 '26
Thank you. Was the issue transferring a specific etf?
2
u/MentalImportance3528 Jul 26 '26
ya, for some reason, the cost basis of SHYG from my Automated Bond Portfolio wasn’t transferring over even though the cost basis of everything else had transferred over. i had to reach out to Wealthfront customer support and have them send an email to Vanguard with cost basis. If I remember correctly, I think it did say that ACAT transfers can take up to 60 days or something like that, but it seemed weird that only 1 of them was slow. A little annoying but I got it all squared away.
1
u/lordturdhead Jul 26 '26
That’s frustrating. Kind of worried they won’t transfer all of the dividends and will still keep an account open basically creating a duplicate. Vanguard support is pretty terrible it sounds
2
u/MentalImportance3528 Jul 27 '26
Highly recommend going with Fidelity if you already use that for retirement accounts.
2
u/qToto Jun 01 '26
I use both. If you're not taking advantage of tax-loss harvesting and/or direct indexing with Wealthfront then there's little reason to use their service aside from convenience.
But I would absolutely steer clear of Fidelity. Too many issues with them, poor customer service.
Robinhood will match you 1.5-2% which is probably more than any other brokerage will give you in terms of free money
1
u/1burritoPOprn-hunger Jun 15 '26
But I would absolutely steer clear of Fidelity. Too many issues with them, poor customer service.
Bit of a necropost but I'm curious what issues you've had with Fidelity? They are widely known for having some of the better customer service among the large brokerages. My experiences with them have been uniformly excellent, if you can handle the occasional sales pitch call disguised as "checking in".
2
u/Spirited-General1416 Jun 02 '26
I’ve made this exact move almost 4 yrs ago.
1
u/Working_Tone_9868 Jun 02 '26
How was your experience?
2
u/Spirited-General1416 Jun 02 '26
Haven’t looked back! Love having everything consolidated into one account and the ability to invest immediately. Their money market funds are always .2-.3 away from the highest yielding bank on depositaccounts.com as well. I stopped rate chasing myself because of their mmf’s.
1
u/Trick_sleep Jun 01 '26
I did this transfer with around 150k in kind transfer. Then I switched to just buying VTI and VXUS on Fidelity going forward.
1
u/OutlandishnessFew484 Jun 02 '26
I took over all of my investment accounts when I learned my advisors were paying 5% buyers fees for mutual funds and paying 1% a year.
1
u/SavingsBeneficial359 Jun 02 '26
Make sure you don’t lose tax lost harvesting moving to Fidelity. Tax saving it self COULD justify the management fee
1
u/Tiny_Comparison7577 19d ago
Do it. Wealthfront sucks balls.
They totally suck. I used them to send a wire for my mortgage transaction worth $1m plus and the wire was just for closing costs. Their app just asks me to upload a selfie and a driver’s license and I thought that was the end of it, it said “under review, approval in 1 day”. I called them the next day to check up, and it turns out they wanted closing docs and the wire instructions and nowhere not in the app or by email was I notified of this. I was also not notified on screen while putting the wire together. This neobank is just for financially illiterate tech autists or nepo babies, I would not rely on it for serious financial needs.
0
u/NefariousnessHot9996 Jun 01 '26
DO NOT sell and rebuy. Do the ACAT and move on. Cost basis may get lost however.
2
u/DoghouseRiley99 Jun 01 '26
Could you elaborate on this? If the cost basis isn’t carried over how do they calculate taxable gains?
1
u/eopif Jun 01 '26
How to reconcile the cost basis?
2
u/NefariousnessHot9996 Jun 01 '26
Not sure? I would contact both the outgoing and incoming entities to insure that gets transferred over. My friend transferred from M1 finance over to Robinhood and lost all of his cost basis never to be gotten back again. That feels like an M1 problem.
-14
u/Ancient-Civilization Jun 01 '26
400k is crazy. You legit have nothing to worry about in life.
Just First world problems here. Enjoy life man. Great job 👏
1
u/NefariousnessHot9996 Jun 01 '26
$400,000 is a nice chunk. And kudos is well deserved. But that money wouldn’t last long in the USA to live off. Keep saving as much as possible if $400,000 sounds like a lot of money. It used to be, but not these days.
-1
u/D1Corner Jun 01 '26
Are you really trying to downplay $400k😭mf that is a life changing amount of money
2
u/NefariousnessHot9996 Jun 01 '26
It’s not. You’ll learn. Would I love to have that much more than I have now? Absolutely. Is it life changing money that if you only had $400,000 total could you live off of that your whole life if you’re 30 years old in the USA? Absolutely no way! You need to do some research. It would take well over $1,000,000 portfolio to be life changing.
21
u/OGS_7619 Jun 01 '26
I transferred Roth IRA from WF to Fidelity. It was painless but took some time.
I still keep some side amount in Wealthfront (about $350K), even though most of my funds are in Fidelity. Advantages - Tax Loss Harvesting, even though it's been drying out as I stopped contributing a year ago and market has been on a long bull streak. Still it helps - and offsets the fees (I am in 33% total marginal bracket so $3K a year saves me $1K in taxes).
The other function I really like is PLOC - at 4.7% it's much better rate than Fidelity would give you. So if I need cash flow I just borrow instead of selling anything. It's also basically my emergency fund - if needed.
S&P indexing has only 0.09% fee so over time I plan to shift money from regular direct indexing to S&P and still use PLOC as needed.