“Simplifying” My Retirement Accounts: Part Two of the Epic Rollover Saga of DOOM!

In Part One of the Great Rollover Saga, your bold and feisty pro­tag­o­nist had near­ly lost her mind deal­ing with the var­i­ous peo­ple involved in try­ing to get every­thing trans­ferred over. Out of 3 accounts (all done at the same time because why not?), not one of them was accept­ed after the ini­tial round of effort. 

It was time to get seri­ous for Round Two. 

Well.….…. it was time to get seri­ous after the whole plan got inter­rupt­ed by your favorite bold and feisty  blog­ger becom­ing a comatose, fever­ish mess for a week after suc­cumb­ing to Covid. (I’m fine now but I did not have the ener­gy to make food, let alone argue with peo­ple on the phone. Not to men­tion I kept cough­ing like a 30-year smoker.)

After I recov­ered from Covid, I resumed my efforts. I was not going to be defeat­ed by this rollover process. I got two emails from the ben­e­fits cen­ter that my doc­u­ments had been received. This was incred­i­bly stress­ful since I sent 3 envelopes, but the last con­fir­ma­tion email arrived the fol­low­ing day, so while the anx­i­ety was fierce, it was short-lived. Thankfully. 

Round Two for Prime

Prime, if you recall, is the main 401(k) account from the first com­pa­ny to employ me. I sent in the paper check, the form from the ben­e­fits cen­ter, and the plan infor­ma­tion that includ­ed the Let­ter of Deter­mi­na­tion (LoD) from the IRS that it came from a qual­i­fied plan. The form was good, the check was incor­rect­ly addressed, and they missed the LoD state­ment in the stack of paper­work. I used the chat func­tion to talk to an employ­ee at the ben­e­fits cen­ter and copied the tran­script into a Word doc so I had a record of what was said. That came very in handy. So, I was able to get them to accept the LoD but the check was still incor­rect­ly made out. They had reject­ed the check and were going to send it back to me in the mail with me none the wis­er if I had­n’t fol­lowed up. The con­fir­ma­tion emails I got said to allow two busi­ness days for pro­cess­ing so after each batch of mail was accept­ed, I had to call in two days lat­er to see what excit­ing and won­der­ful things I had to do next. 

To do for round 3: get a new check filled out cor­rect­ly and mail it in.

Round Two for Triangle

The check for Tri­an­gle was sent direct­ly from Van­guard to the ben­e­fits cen­ter so that was one less stres­sor on me. I was told the 1099‑R would be ade­quate infor­ma­tion for them, but they told me the wrong infor­ma­tion. It was not enough for the LoD, but it was enough to count as my dis­tri­b­u­tion statement.

More on that later.

The prob­lem with this one was the mon­ey was rolled over into an IRA, so it was­n’t tech­ni­cal­ly an employ­er retire­ment account any­more and I did­n’t have access to the LoD any­more. An hour on hold with Van­guard just to talk to some­one led to two trans­fers with the req­ui­site iden­ti­ty ver­i­fi­ca­tion ques­tions and mul­ti­ple holds as they tried to find the LoD from the orig­i­nal plan. Mirac­u­lous­ly, they were able to find it for me AND it was sent to my mes­sage cen­ter online the next day. No mail! Woo! So the next day I down­loaded the pdf statement. 

I was all set to print it out and mail it, but then I dis­cov­ered the ben­e­fits cen­ter had a very clev­er­ly hid­den online doc­u­ment upload link. I uploaded the LoD and, no joke, it was accept­ed with the mon­ey deposit­ed into my cur­rent 401(k) account a few days lat­er. IT WAS A MIRACLE. 

Round 3 to do: Nothing! 

Round Two for Southdown

This was bru­tal, y’all. This account was miss­ing both the let­ter of deter­mi­na­tion and the dis­tri­b­u­tion state­ment; the check was actu­al­ly addressed cor­rect­ly so that was­n’t an issue. Once again, I had to call back the orig­i­nal invest­ment com­pa­ny and get them to send the doc­u­ments to me. They agreed to send the let­ter of deter­mi­na­tion straight to my ben­e­fits cen­ter address instead of using me as the mid­dle (wo)man. The dis­tri­b­u­tion state­ment took a lit­tle longer for them to find and send to me in the mail. 

BUT. A stroke of luck! I found the orig­i­nal doc­u­ments, took a pic­ture, and uploaded it to the won­der­ful peo­ple at the ben­e­fits cen­ter. It was accept­ed before I got the pack­et in the mail! 

Round 3 to do: Nothing!

Round Three for Prime

I called Fideli­ty back once again and went over the issue with them. They can­celed the first check and issued a new check that was cor­rect­ly addressed. You know how there’s a say­ing that says “Close only counts in horse­shoes and hand grenades”? Well, this was accu­rate because the check was near­ly addressed cor­rect­ly. But not quite. So I got that addressed, they mailed the check to me, I sent it on to the ben­e­fits cen­ter and it was accept­ed. FINALLY.

Round 3 to do: Nothing!

Final Thoughts

Ulti­mate­ly, even though it was the world’s biggest pain in the ass process, I’m grate­ful I went through all the has­sle. Hav­ing one account to check each month for my updates is WONDERFUL. Things are so much eas­i­er when I don’t have to check three dif­fer­ent accounts and add them all up for one cell in the spread­sheet. It might seem like rel­a­tive­ly minor improve­ments, but any hur­dle I can remove is ben­e­fi­cial to my sil­ly brain that likes to con­vince me there are too many steps.

The oth­er major ben­e­fit came when I inter­viewed for the new job at my cur­rent employ­er. Part of the screen­ing require­ments for the new job involved check­ing into my finances to make sure there are no con­flicts of inter­est that would inter­fere with my abil­i­ty to be an impar­tial judge at client sites. Instead of hav­ing to list out all those for­mer 401k accounts, I did­n’t have to list any at all since they were able to see what my employ­er-spon­sored retire­ment accounts looked like. That sim­pli­fied the inter­view HR did with me, so all this effort was­n’t wast­ed after all! 

That being said, I do not want to go through the rollover process again any­time soon! If I’ll need to do that in the future, I hope the process has evolved to take advan­tage of tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ments like intra-com­pa­ny fund trans­fers. While I’m at it, I’d also like to wish for a pur­ple pony! Ha!