Of course you're right. The customer has every right to expect that the brokerage company gets it right. And if the customer is dissatisfied, they can walk away.The account holder also has the ability to choose a company that can get it correct.Vanguard should be able to help you with this. There are specialists who deal with retirement accounts specifically. By default, I don't think they'd necessarily know that your spouse is more than 10 years younger than the account holder.
All of that said, it is ultimately the account holder who is responsible for making sure the RMDs are correct.
I'm in the process of really simplifying our family's investments considerably. Over several decades, we've had accounts at Vanguard, Fidelity, Schwab, Hancock, TIAA, and others that I've forgotten. Every single one of them made at least one mistake, and it was indeed their mistake that they could not blame on others. The same goes for accountants and tax software. The mistakes ranged from minor to major, and I don't remember one of them being caught by anyone but me. Sometimes you do fire someone--I certainly fired my accountant when I was sent a colleague's tax return my mistake. And sometimes you let it go. Everyone has to find their own arbitrary line that they can't cross.
Here, if a wrong table was used, was it because Vanguard didn't have the correct data? Did they try to rectify the situation? The devil's always going to be in the details. As long as I'm mentally sharp enough, I'll always verify the RMD amounts since it's just not that hard to do it, especially if you do it every year by habit.
Statistics: Posted by Artsdoctor — Sat Jan 11, 2025 4:55 pm
