VANGUARD Financial

V

Victor

Senior Member
Location
midwest USA
This company has some of the worst customer service I have heard.


I was on the phone with them over 30 minutes trying to get them to send me prospectuses
for mutual funds and they refused to do this. One girl said that they don't do this
and it costs too much. (Bull) She said to look it up online and print it myself, and I
said I already looked online. Is that asking too much ? I asked. Are you too cheap
to send it out? Well, you just don't care about personal investors--the huge company
that you are can afford to lose some business and it doesn't matter. This comment
did not faze them. They sent me one prospectus because I had the old one--that's it.
They probably did not like my sarcasm and impatience.
And you wait a long time for them to answer the phone.

All the other companies I deal with are a sincere pleasure to work with except Vanguard

BTW they have caller ID and use it.
 

I have had accounts with Vanguard for over 25 years and have never had a problem with service of any kind, in fact I find their service exemplary.
 
I've owned a couple of Vanguard mutual funds for years. Good results. Low or no fees. I'll admit I've never used customer service much though. I remember they did assign me some kind of advisor a few years ago that used to call occasionally to see if I wanted to change anything. He finally quit calling. :)
 
I've always had excellent customer service from Vanguard. I can't recall receiving a paper prospectus in the mail for many years, and have just downloaded and viewed them in Adobe Reader. Saves paper and saves time, and hopefully also saves on their very good low fee funds.
 
I also have accounts with Vanguard. I've never encountered any problems so far. I do most of what I need to do online. But here's a silly story...I took a distribution and it must've come to XXX amount of dollars and one cent. They sent me a check for a penny! Why the hell they didn't just leave it in the settlement fund until I took another distribution, or just left it there period, I'll never know. I kept meaning to call them and tell them how ridiculous I thought that was.
 
If this is a service Vanguard no longer provides, there's not much someone can do except perhaps send a polite suggestion or complaint email/letter. I'd like my local food store to deliver, but that's not a service they offer. I'm not going to give the person who answers their customer service line a hard time about it and then complain I received bad customer service because they don't offer what I want.

Also I would guess that the person you spoke with on the phone was an adult woman, not a teenager or younger.
 
I made a "mistake" and put in a redemption order for a small number of shares right before the Divs/Caps were to be paid. I thought it cost me a few dollars but Vanguard counted all my shares to figure the Divs/Caps, then filled the redemption order.
 
keep in mind that fidelity has lots of index funds that are cheaper than vanguards . fidelity's bond funds are so much better too. fidelity total bond fund has blown the doors off vanguards version over almost every time frame . you can also trade certain i-shares and fidelity etf's commission free .
 
Thanks Mathjak for the advice on Fidelity bond funds. We have the Admiral Total Bond fund at VG now.

We will look into the Fidelity Bond funds. Over the next 3 years we are working towards moving our AA to ~55 to 50% Equities, and 40% to 45% bonds and 5 to 10% cash.
 
luckily i did not have much in vanguards admiral total bond . especially last year . i use fidelity 90% . for the 1 year ,while vanguards total bond returned 1.07% fidelity's returned over 6%.

when it comes to bonds , indexing can not be the best way to go .
 

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