I moved money over just over 3 months ago to get Platinum Honors status.The Merrill/preferred rewards thread has become a bit unwieldy so I wanted to ask a specific question.
Is anyone using Merrill as their primary brokerage, or at least using it for more than the 100k required for preferred rewards?
If so, what’s your experience been? What types of accounts do you have there? Any “gotchas” to look out for?
Aside from no fractional shares and manual forms to do a Roth conversion, it seems to offer a lot of what fidelity and Schwab do.
You can't buy Treasuries at auction.
Like BoA's site, it's dated.
The settlement, like Schwab, pays nothing. You have to manually buy a MMF. The best MMFs they have pay less than Vanguard unless you can buy into the institutional classes.
They list Treasuries by their CUSIP and don't sort them by maturity. (I have a T-Bill ladder as part of my emergency fund.) You have to dig into details to see the maturity date.
Now that I've gotten the bonus, I'll let the Bills mature and pull the cash back out to bring it back to Vanguard. I leave my taxable and Roth there, with the holdings as is, reinvesting dividends.
New money will go into Vanguard. For as much bellyaching as people.do about it, for my needs it's fine -- and I have accounts at Schwab and Fidelity as well.
Statistics: Posted by exodusNH — Sun Sep 08, 2024 1:47 am — Replies 2 — Views 152