club_cafe: Brokerage Accounts

iras1 on

Barbara,

I can't think of a good reason to maintain two accounts for a small club. As you stated, you will be paying inactivity fees to TDWaterhouse, in addition to any trading fees/commissions at Ameritrade. If you have any problems at Ameritrade, you won't be able to instantaneously "switch back" to TDWaterhouse. You'll still have to move your cash/securities. If I recall correctly, Ameritrade does not pay interest on cash balances below a fairly high threshold. Maintaining two accounts just makes it that much harder to have your funds working for you at all times. Finally, maintaining two accounts makes it at least twice as difficult to keep your financial records straight.

Ira Smilovitz

In a message dated 11/26/02 7:42:43 AM Eastern Standard Time, baburgess7@bivio.com writes:

How many of you are maintaining two brokerage accounts?
Please share your reason(s) for maintaining two brokerage
accounts.

We are in the process of leaving TD Waterhouse because of
excessive fees and high commissions. One of our partners
would like to keep them as a back up primairly because they
are local. Also, he feels we need a backup in case of
technical problems with our new broker - Ameritrade.

I think I am going to strongly suggest we do not keep
Waterhouse because of the inactivty fee. In order to avoid
the inactivity fee we must have at lest $10,000 in
securities/Cash or have three trades every six months.

Thanks,

Barbara, Treasurer
MET Club

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