Murphy’s Law Strikes the Financial World

When it rains it pours

Photo by ahmad gunnaivi on Unsplash

It is at times like these that I almost wish I lived a hand-to-mouth existence. Life would be so much simpler and less aggravating. As with many others who suffer a similar financially-related affliction, this is not about the fluctuating valuation of my portfolio. This is about financial institutions’ human or system errors adversely affecting my life.

The nightmare started with Charles Schwab taking over Ameritrade and forwarding confusing 1099’s for the year 2023 that had me underreporting my income for that year.

That put the IRS on my tail for money that I rightfully owed plus a significant amount in penalties and interest. I threatened Schwab with a FINRA case pursuant to their sloth to which they responded immediately claiming they’d advised me on multiple occasions of the complicated particulars for the takeover year and the fault lay with me.

But the speed with which the custom correspondence came said otherwise. Clearly, they did not want the matter to come in front of arbitration and made a verbal offer I felt was reasonable enough to resolve the matter. But when I asked for the deal in writing, none was forthcoming. Hmm!

In the meantime, while that remains unresolved, two fumbles popped up in my email and snail mail from two other financial entities on the same day.

In my daily snail mail, I found a letter from Wells Fargo (where I have some mutual funds with Wells brokerage) telling me they no longer wanted me as a client.

“Get your money out by 12/8,” was the message.

Oddly, two weeks ago, I ran into the two Wells employees I know personally in the streets of New York where they told me Wells had a question about my income source and I was in danger of getting evicted owing to my financial felony plea deal from 2016.

This is not a situation with which I’m unfamiliar. I’ve been thrown out of multiple financial institutions on numerous occasions even though I did absolutely nothing wrong with them.

The problem is that the government requires paperwork on convicted felons they’d rather not deal with. So they dumped me to avoid the headache regardless of whether I’d paid my price to society (in spades in my case — double what I owed and a year in prison).

The two Wells guys and I really got along and none of us was happy corporate had a problem. In response to the issue, I forwarded all manner of financials to convince Wells I was ok.

Some time later, one of the duo called to say we were good once I’d sent my tax returns for 2024 — and they’d be seeing about a bonus I requested to move all my money to their brokerage.

If they could beat the Schwab offer, I had (and have) no problems leaving Schwab behind. I never signed on with Schwab in the first place. I got them in the Ameritrade buyout.

Having received the GTFO letter from corporate Wells, I thought to call my branch (those two guys I like) to see if there was anything they could do about the problem.

But then I balked. Why bother? I figured I’d just move the funds to Schwab for the moment. The branch manager had already promised he’d pay the ACAT fee. Nothing to lose in the deal and less to compute come tax time.

The move took all of 2 minutes to effect on the Schwab site. Obviously, they want people’s money and make it easy to do transfers.

Coincidentally, just two hours later, I received an email from my guy at Wells about the requested bonus to which I responded I’d been dumped by his corporation in a letter that very morning and had already put in for a transfer.

He assured me that was a mistake he could rectify if I wanted to stick around with Wells.

Obviously, this conflicting directive did not inspire confidence in Wells’ efficiency. One guy says yes and another says no? Come on, man. Why would I stay with you guys?

Maybe you and Schwab could get together and figure out why you both muck stuff up so badly.

Later that day, I received a notification about my request that the IRS not charge me the penalty they’d hit me with given the Schwab circumstances, whose 1099’s had me ignoring my Ameritrade income from that year and at once doubling the amount I paid on the Schwab interest. (Yes, Schwab’s export into the Turbotax software had stated my interest income doubly.)

To my relief, the IRS decided to eliminate the penalty (though not the interest) as expressed in the cover letter, but then sent the exact same computation from our previous correspondence which indeed had the penalty in their figuring.

So it was back to the IRS portal to request the recomputation once again. Hopefully, the next communication will have that penalty eliminated.

As for Wells? They’re gone from my life so I can’t suffer any more indignities at their hands.

Now it’s back to Schwab to ensure their verbal deal will come to fruition.

You see what I mean about almost wishing I was a hand-to-mouther? I wouldn’t have any of these headaches were I broke. You get the idea.

It turns out it’s not just the federal government whose employees can get swampy. It happens in the private sector as well. Unfortunately, I know it all too well.

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