topic Re: Brokerage stock transfer fees in Personal Finance

Brokerage stock transfer fees

xenon3030 — Mon, 06 Mar 2023 18:25:52 GMT

I have ~26k of stocks in Etrade and I want to transfer them to my CMA-Edge Merrill Lynch account. What are the fees that can be involved? What are the possible ways to minimize the fees?

PS: I want to raise my BOA/ML asset to above 25k or more to gain BOA Premium Rewards tier.

Re: Brokerage stock transfer fees

Citylights18 — Mon, 06 Mar 2023 20:28:15 GMT

With 401k money they have very specific roll over/transfer forms. I'm not sure if you have to pay a fee at all to do it.

Uusually you can pick up a transfer bonus when moving money over as an incentive. Can be as high as 1% ($250 in your case).

Re: Brokerage stock transfer fees

coldfusion — Mon, 06 Mar 2023 21:43:42 GMT

An in-kind transfer would probably be the most straightforward process. ETrade charges $75 for the outbound transfer, IIRC Merrill does not charge a fee for inbound transfers but you'd want to doublecheck that.

Merrill may currently have an active promotion that you'd qualify for that provides a bonus based upon the value of the inbound assets.

I know it's been mentioned here before but can confirm that ML assets count toward Preferred Rewards status.

Re: Brokerage stock transfer fees

jeffinsd — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 15:55:36 GMT

You can do an ACAT transfer and it will probably be somewhere around $75 or so. But like the other replies, you should also be able to get a bonus, especially if it's a new account.

Re: Brokerage stock transfer fees

iced — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 18:23:35 GMT

@xenon3030 wrote:
I have ~26k of stocks in Etrade and I want to transfer them to my CMA-Edge Merrill Lynch account. What are the fees that can be involved? What are the possible ways to minimize the fees?

PS: I want to raise my BOA/ML asset to above 25k or more to gain BOA Premium Rewards tier.

When I rolled out of E-Trade back in 2018 or so it was around $75 in fees. Per https://us.etrade.com/what-we-offer/pricing-and-rates, it's still $75 today for a full transfer.

Some brokerages will reimburse another brokerage's transfer fees if you're rolling into them. Check with Merrill. You're doing a pretty small transfer though, so I don't know how much Merrill will jump at this.

Incidentally, I'm also about to transfer an account out of Merrill into Fidelity; maybe I'll learn what their fees are...

Re: Brokerage stock transfer fees

xenon3030 — Thu, 16 Mar 2023 17:12:01 GMT

It looks like the etrade partial transfer fee gets waived, if keeping >5k in the account. I am doing one partial transfer and let's see how it goes.