Vanguard website changes

[a_posteriori]

Today I logged into my Vanguard account to do my monthly check up.

Entering outside investments has totally changed and it took me a long while to figure out I had to go to the bottom of the page, not visible, and click save after I updated my shares total. Ok, got'er done but time is money.

Then I find that the asset allocation % now is not including said outside investments which it has done for decades now.

Operationally the Vanguard has rapidly gotten much worse.

Is it me or is it Vanguard?

Please feel free to blitz this if I violated any ...head rules.

[henry]

It's not you. These have been ongoing problems with the Vanguard website.

See the following thread:

Editing outside portfolio at Vanguard broken?
viewtopic.php?t=440845

[a_posteriori]

I think I found the problem... Vanguard has taken the external account bond fund and put it under the stock allocation.

Wow, I'm impressed! Thanks for the responses. Going back to sleep now...

[Svensk Anga]

Then I find that the asset allocation % now is not including said outside investments which it has done for decades now.

I find that the asset allocation tool is including outside investments, but they have suddenly started listing some stock mutual funds as "other". Their programming apparently does not recognize FSKAX - Fidelity total stock fund and SWTSX - Schwab total stock fund as domestic equity funds. It is apparent in the detail if you drill down far enough. I added those percentages to what they list for stock to get my current allocation number.

[wwhan]

I think I found the problem... Vanguard has taken the external account bond fund and put it under the stock allocation.

Wow, I'm impressed! Thanks for the responses. Going back to sleep now...

The outside investment precentage for FSPSX (international) in Portfolio Watch was broken around Oct 15th, then fixed about Oct 18th, then it was broken the next week and still has NOT been fixed.

[drg02b]

Wow... Vanguard is driving me crazy with the website. Seems like they keep finding ways to make it worse.

1. Sometime in the last month, the outside investment list stopped accepting decimals, because when I went to update my retirement holdings, it would no longer let me enter a decimal. This is extremely annoying for a $500 fund, so I'm left with a rounding error of ~$250 when I'd ideally like to keep totals all in one place.
2. Often times, when logging in and viewing the holdings page, my settlement fund balance doesn't display (especially for the non-retirement brokerage) account. Only way to see this is to start into a transaction).
3. Often hovering over the transaction menu for a fund, the options don't display clearly (sometimes having to zoom in/out on the Chrome page) before things show up properly.
4. Email confirmations often show a transaction of ZERO instead of the actual dollar amount.

These are things that have gotten worse and generally weren't problems a few months ago. I don't know what is going on at Vanguard (letting a 10-year code the website and then letting a 5 year old play with further?). I've housed everything within my power at Vanguard over the years. It's a mental leap to jump through the hoops of transferring everything out, but every day I'm getting closer and closer to pulling the trigger.

[nisiprius]

It's not you. I don't know what kind of management or development methodology they are following, but it feels as if they don't subject changes to any serious SQA or review. They just roll out the new code, and then, very gradually, slowly, painfully, and incrementally sandpaper some of the sharpest splinters.

They also have developed the habit of canning website features they've had for over a decade (the "nest egg calculator") and not replacing them with anything.

They don't seem to know what they've changed, or at least they can't be bothered to provide explicit guidance (like a note saying "this feature is now on this screen.")

It's a kind of insult to existing customers. A new customer, coming to the site for the first time, isn't going to notice that longstanding features are simply gone, or rearranged, or work in a different way.

This will sound ridiculously kind to Vanguard, but they aren't alone. Since the pandemic, websites in general everywhere have gotten worse, just as customer service everywhere has gotten worse. I recently searched on the BJ's Wholesale website, bjs.com using the search string men's sweatshirts and got twenty results, including three gift cards, four perfume and toiletry sets, five multivitamins, two earrings, a paper shredder... and no sweatshirts. Try it yourself. I mean, how does that even happen?

[jebmke]

I recently searched on the BJ's Wholesale website, bjs.com using the search string men's sweatshirts and got twenty results, including three gift cards, four perfume and toiletry sets, five multivitamins, two earrings, a paper shredder... and no sweatshirts.

This seems to be the norm. Amazon is almost unusable now. It is a last resort for me. If I can't find something locally I typically start at the site of the manufacturer -- so, if I'm looking for DarnTough socks, I go to their site first before I go to places like AMZ.

Another (sometimes successful) method is to not use the site's search but construct a focused search using Google, narrowing the site and time boundaries.

Fortunately, VG hasn't been an issue for me but my needs are pretty small. I'm not to the point of doing RMDs so I have no need to make transactions.

[rkhusky]

In the past couple weeks, when I go to my bank login page, it doesn’t load and when I try to quit, it seems to lockup the computer for awhile. It works fine with my backup browser.

Vanguard works fine for me on my usual browser. But I don’t input external investments. I just buy/sell/exchange funds and view fund balances and transactions.