Saturday, December 10, 2016

Automated purchases of index funds - how to view and discontinue at Vanguard

It’s dull stuff, but if you’re a lazy investor it’s hard to beat dollar cost average investing. Every month dollars automatically flow from a cash fund to buy index fund shares. Historically there were no fees for doing this within a fund family. We have been using this to buy Vanguard low-expense S&P index fund shares since shortly after the last crash.

I think it’s time to stop.

Except it’s hard to figure out how to stop - or how to start for that matter. In the Bogle era Vanguard used to talk about this sort of thing, but the world has moved on. There’s no money for Vanguard in these transactions. Google gave me some clues — here’s how to do it.

  1. Go to My accounts > account maintenance.
  2. In “Banking and money movement” click “Automatic exchange

From here you can see active transactions, follow the directions to delete (or create) one. You can’t delete a transaction on the day it’s scheduled to occur. When you delete you get a printable transaction record and a copy is emailed to your account of record.

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