bighairymike wrote: "Then one day i ran across a story like yours, of someone who had a terrible time with an inheritance held by Vanguard. There I learned, that until all beneficiaries complete their paperwork, including setting up an account to receive their inheritance, Vanguard would not distribute anything to anyone. That caused me to change things...

Hi y'all, I just thought I'd pipe in here with personal experience about from several points of view with Vanguard beneficiary stuff.

I helped a family member as their POA, later as their executor, and as one of many beneficiaries to a taxable Vanguard IRA account they passed with. We had no problems with people getting their inheritance as soon as they contacted Vanguard. As executor I knew that one of the beneficiaries didn't contact Vanguard to collect their share for more than a year after most were disbursed. This was a few years ago. I guess their policy has changed to correct the issues that BHM heard about.

In decades of interacting with Vanguard on mine and a couple family members' behalf, I've never run into any issues with Vanguard that weren't resolved fairly quickly, though I do note service has gone downhill some compared to 30 years ago. The glitch bighairymike ran into with the old security code was undoubtably irritating.

I trust them to offer pretty much the best possible expenses and rates on index stock and bond funds and money market funds, and to not charge any sneaky fees. You can get their ETFs anywhere now, though, and I'm sure some of the other money market funds available out there are competitive, so if you want checking and debit card or other services I'm sure you can do just fine somewhere else. Checking now, the Vanguard money market funds (Federal, Treasury, and Cash Reserves Federal) are yielding 5.28-29% with expense ratios of .09-.11. Anyone beat that?