Interesting because at least for non IRA accounts, I thought I recently ran across a pushbutton method online to convert a taxable mutual fund account into a brokerage account.Just an FYI regarding something I recently encountered. I wanted to buy some TIPS in a rollover IRA and figured that would be easy since you can buy a pretty broad spectrum of investment products in an IRA. But, I got error messages telling me it wasn't allowed. A phone call with Fidelity revealed that I had "mutual fund IRA" and not a "brokerage IRA". Huh? Apparently back in Neanderthal days, all rollovers resulted in mutual fund IRAs. In the modern era, they are created as brokerage IRAs. It took about an hour on the phone, while simultaneously doing things in my online account, to correct matters. It involved created a new brokerage IRA and moving in all the funds from the old one. I was told this had no tax implications. For archival purposes the old IRA remains attached to your account, although with zero funds.
I don't recall ever going through this for the rollover IRA I've had since the early 2000's. Perhaps I created it as a brokerage account from day 1 even though all I owned were mutual funds at the time. Same for my wife's IRA. Neither of us have a nonfunded IRA showing up at Fidelity. I do have a nonfunded taxable mutual fund account because at the point where I decided to mainly hold ETFs, I created a new account for that and then moved everything over from the mutual fund account. No tax implications for just moving shares of something you own between accounts by the way, unless you're moving them from an IRA to a taxable account. At the time, there didn't seem to be a way to convert the mutual fund account like there is now.
Cheers.
Statistics: Posted by dcabler — Sun Jul 07, 2024 4:54 am