I recently received a letter in the mail from Fidelity saying my former employer, Fox, was going to cash out my 401(k) and send me a check. I’m not quite ready to retire yet, so I called Fidelity and asked how to roll my funds into my new SC Johnson 401(k). They told me it was easy– I needed to download a form online and send it in. I would get a check in the mail from Fidelity that was payable to Fidelity and I would have to mail that back to Fidelity with a different form. It seemed like a lot of red tape, and it cost me $50, but I had a few hundred bucks in there, so I went ahead and did that.
Well, it turns out nothing in the financial world is easy, and all those forms did was put my money in an IRA. So, I called them back, and they told me I had to fill out yet another form sending all that money into my SCJ 401(k). So I filled out the form and sent it in just like they told me, but apparently that wasn’t good enough because I got yet another check in the mail from Fidelity payable to Fidelity that I had to send back to Fidelity with another form. Well, they mailed that check back to me because apparently I didn’t fill out the right form… even thought it was the one they told me to fill out.
So I finally sent them the correct form and lo and behold, I had successfully rolled over my 401(k). Or so I thought. A few days later I was checking out my 401(k) balance online and the brilliant masterminds at Fidelity had deposited nine cents in dividends into my old account.
For a while I was concerned that it would cost me a buck in postage to get my nine cents back, so I decided to leave the fund alone. Well, I guess Fidelity figured out that they screwed up somewhere because a few days ago, in the mail I received this: A check for $.09!!! I’m sure I’ll have to pay some tax penalty for cashing out before my 59th birthday.
What concerns me most about this whole process is that these are the buffoons who are managing my life savings! Maybe I should just put all the cash in a shoebox in the closet.
