About a year or so ago I was advised by Morgan Stanley that they could no longer manage my account charging me a percentage of the market value of my account.interestingly, none of my other brokerage accounts did that. Anyway, they started charging me outrageous fees per buy/sell which is not that uncommon for the industry but they were high.
Some where along the line, the man I had always dealt with, Chris O'Neil, dumped me and never even told me. He just passed me over to one of his "associates" without so much and a thank you or kiss my #*%. No mention of minimum investments. Nothing
Then I ran out of money and the fees to close the account were ridiculous. Even though it was never disclosed in any of the forms I signed when I opened the accounts (I know because I have reviewed them) they are now charging me an annual maintenance fee for an account that just has cash in it and am charging me $100 for each of the accounts I need to close. They know that I have not had a job for over 2 years but they sure don't care. I was a banker for a long time and I know that those fees can be waived.
I had an IRA that had a few assets in it and I transferred all but one of the assets out of the account. They, of course, charged me a fee for what they said was closing the account even though it still had one asset in it. Prior to that, I had rolled money from that IRA to a Roth IRA last year. I then decided that I needed to reclassify the funds to an IRA again. Guess what? Even though there was (and still is) an asset in that IRA account, they told me the account was closed and that I could not roll the money back unless I opened another account. Since all of the accounts were being terminated, they would charge me one more $100 to close the account I had just opened since they would not do a rollover back to the account with one asset. Bottom line: they would charge me $400 to close what was 3 accounts.
They are greedy jerks and I would never use the McNeil group at Morgan Stanley.
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