Intercst, on the other Fool board, detailed a situation where (one of?) his accounts was waylaid by someone opening an account in his name in another city, then transferring the bulk into the new location. Luckily caught in time and reversed. $900,000 oopsie! For those interested: discussion.fool.com - Big problem with vanguard

Not big problem with Vanguard, but several small ones led me to ditch them in about 2023-2024 for Schwab.

I'll see if I can remember them all...

1) They had the wrong contribution amount maximum for 401(k)s one year. If the authorized amount for the new pending year was $30k, they still had it at the prior year's amount. Hard wired into their website. My wife is plan admin and plan participant for her sole proprietorship's 401(k) so we're deep in the weeds in the mechanics of this. I called them and was rather bothered they had this wrong.

2) They farmed out their small business work to some poor reputation firm, forget the name but begins with A, around that timeframe. Too small of accounts for them to be bothered, I suppose. And they were going to charge a fee for some nonsense to move to the new administration company or such. That made the decision easy to move to Schwab.

3) Style drift - they were definitely hawking actively managed products. This really started, by my measure, after Bogle died. Like, I get the feels they were thinking internally "we can get higher fees after this old codger passes but we can't do this until he's gone because he fought against this for 40-50 years".

I am with Schwab, no issues with them and they never are hawking things to me. They present ideas sometimes, and sometimes I take them up on them (new tax loss harvesting brokerage account, for example this year, that uses algorithms - not AI - to make some buy/sell decisions and has pretty much tracked the S&P, and has reduced my tax bill by thousands). I think Fidelity and whoever owns E*Trade now are perfectly solid.