I have successfully transferred one of my TD Mutual Fund Accounts (my Emergency Account ) to Questrade (as an experiment, but also to divest from the TD Mutual Fund side of the world), and have found a few fascinating issues that can arise. Still, the big one for me is that having Questrade took 10 days to do it. Should account transfers take that long?
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
The nice part about the 10 days is that even though I had to fill in (by hand) a bunch of forms to authorize the transfer, I then scanned the document and sent it to Questrade, who then seemed to start working on it within a few hours (which is a bit faster than a lot of times when I have dealt with other Bank branches).
The sticking point for me was the 10-day wait to do the transfer. While I can understand it is taking a while if the accounts were Registered savings accounts (RRSP, RESP, RDSP, LIRA or the like), this is just a Mutual Fund account going to a Questrade account. Seemed a little long.
I could have done this manually, by following these steps
- Cash out all Funds held in my Mutual Fund account (however in this case it is a bit messier because they are E-series accounts, so I would first have to transfer the funds to the TD Money Market account, and then cash that fund out). Estimated time for this to take 3 days or so (if you start in the morning).
- Take Funds from sale and transfer it via on-line banking tools to Questrade account. This could take 2-3 days until funds are in and usable in the account.
As you can see even in the worst case this should have taken 7 business days (and that is mostly due to the E-series funds being involved), so really not sure why this took 10 days?
I also tripped over the fact that either Questrade or TD Mutual Funds will not transfer assets in kind, as I was holding E-series funds. My guess is that TD Mutual Funds did not want to transfer the funds, but I never got a clear statement from Questrade about who(m) was to blame, so I was only able to do a transfer of funds (not in kind) for the account. The nice part is, I got an e-mail telling me this, I was able to update my form, scan it, and get everything back on track in about 2 hours.
At the end of it, with a few “pot holes” on the road, it did take 10 days, but I guess it is not as bad as it could have been (those pot holes with other banks might have taken an entire month). I have 1 or 2 other TD Mutual Fund accounts, that I suspect are either going to TD Direct Investing or to Questrade.
Full Disclosure: I am also a Questrade Affiliate (i.e. I put ads on my site, and if you open an account using them, I get paid).
Whenever I transfer (in cash) from my group RRSP to TD Waterhouse, TD tells me it will take 4-6 weeks. Because of past experience I was pleasantly surprised this year when it only took 3 weeks!
Excuse the rudeness, but bleh… I realize there is a lag because some lucky clerk has to do this stuff, but none of this is paper based any more… can we move to the end of the 20th century please?
Yes, ten days is better than I usually expect.
My favourite is Tangerine to iTrade. First, the move from savings to chequing takes 24 hours. My credit union takes .24 seconds. Then it is 2-3 days from Tangerine to iTrade plus another day or two to decide if the transfer is legitimate. They are owned by the same bank!
Hey bigcajunman, this post has excellent timing, as I’m literally about to move some TD e-Series funds out of my company RRSP account into Questrade. When I last did this a couple of years ago, I did the same as you–filled out forms, scanned them, sent them in, waited and waited. When I looked at this over the weekend, I was impressed to see that it looked like they had turned this into an online process…but maybe that’s just to spit out a form that you then scan and print? I’m also stumbling on the part where they need an address and a contact–if I never contact anyone, who do I provide? (The last times I’ve done this, I just looked up the TD Waterhouse main address via Google.) I’m going to call Questrade to ask these questions before proceeding.
My second point was that transfer in funds (vs in kind) is actually good when moving stuff to Questrade because of the relatively expensive cost to sell mutual funds there. I believe that it’s $9.95 or more to sell each fund. I made this mistake earlier when moving RRSP mutual funds from another provider to Questrade: since I was going to sell the mutual funds and buy ETFs, I could have saved Questrade trading charges by doing an in-funds transfer rather than in-kind transfer. Oops!
I found the address by accident, I have it on the forms, but those are at home (the Questrade site won’t show me them after submitted).
I am simply buying ETFs for now, so not having same issues as with Mutual Funds (or Index funds).
Over the last 3-4 years I’ve transferred securities in-kind and cash into Questrade from other investment accounts on numerous occasions. Sometimes these were between registered accounts, at other times unregistered. Questrade used to be slow and somewhat disorganized at their end. The good news is that in the last year or so they have improved a great deal, and my transfers have completed smoothly without undue delay. The ability to scan and send documents helps a lot (although some types of document must still be sent via snail mail due to federal regulations).
Overall Questrade is doing a lot better, but of course, there is still room for improvement!
10 days sounds really fast to me. I can recall waiting for a couple of months. Those were registered accounts, so perhaps that makes a difference. Usually, though, delays are caused by the financial institution giving up the account (TD in your case).
Yeh, it was nice that all the correspondence was done on-line too. TD slowing things down? Does not sound out of the realm of possibilities (said he sarcastically)