yeah, but also easy to find the poster, for example, that deposited five $9,900 cashiers checks over 5 days, etc. Many of these have back stories. Reddit is the wild wild west, so not sure of how much I would rely on some meta data analysis of posts over there.While I will not take the time to do a deep dive on the data breakout, it is not hard to find users with aged accounts getting shut down for no apparent reason: https://www.reddit.com/r/fidelityinvest ... s_blocked/How many of those issues were for newer accounts vs people with well established accounts?I wouldn't call it nonsense. The issue is so prevalent that Fidelity itself has had to officially address a few weeks back (albeit by saying a whole lot of nothing).If you are happy with the simplicity of one stop shop, stick with it. Ignore this "real bank" nonsense. There are many people that have been using Fidelity cash management services for years without encountering any problems.I moved to the One Stop Shop model over a year ago - couldn't be happier with the simplicity. However, was curious on opinions on this security risk.
I read a thread elsewhere that someone commented that having all your cash in a single place is a bad practice. They cited two reasons: getting locked out of your account OR the account getting drained for some reason.
I have a decent amount of cash - should I be keeping this elsewhere? Is centralizing it all in one place bad practice?
If you're concerned about security make a couple of changes:
- keep only 1-2 months of cash in your transactional account, move the rest to a different account
- as a backup, open Schwab brokerage and checking account and keep 1-2 months in MMF or ultrashort treasury ETF (eg SGOV) in a brokerage account.
You can fallback to Schwab accounts in case of a low probability event of your Fidelity account becoming unavailable for prolonged time.
Just peruse some of the account lock issues from the last year, it's a near hourly occurrence at this point: https://www.reddit.com/r/fidelityinvest ... 5e5&t=year
In the last week alone the number has skyrocketed supposedly in response to check fraud running rampant. Yet, you don't see Chase and actual banks taking the measures that Fidelity is taking by locking accounts, cancelling bill pay, shutting down debit card and ACH transactions -- all without notice and all to protect Fidelity, not the customer. And it's not just new users, it's users of various account ages and balances, Fidelity is taking draconian action across the board to cover themselves without regard for the customer. Go take a look at their reddit and see the countless posts about not being able to pay bills, transactions failing while at stores, and the inability to access accounts or get someone on the phone that can help.
Fidelity is not a bank.
Even the reddit threads seemed to indicate the issue was for newer accounts or people doing unusual transactions.
But I would make the observation that it appears Fidelity has amped up its algorithm or whatever, and long-time users are having locks and fraud reviews. Why do I say this——with complaint threads the Fidelity moderators have sort of three modes of reply:
1. Ignore it
2. Answer it specifically
3. Ask the poster to respond directly to the mods.
There gameplan on all these posts has shifted from using all three approaches, to just no. 1.
Statistics: Posted by Lastrun — Sun Sep 15, 2024 7:02 pm — Replies 7198 — Views 1385208