Bottom Line UpFront: if you have personal investor accounts at Vanguard and you need to correspond with them about your accounts, or you need an external bank to correspond with them about your accounts, you can do so by sending your correspondence to this address: Vanguard, P.O. Box 982901, El Paso, TX 79998-2901. Vanguard makes this information so impossibly hard to find that it can’t be an accident; they clearly want to dissuade as many people as possible from sending them correspondence on paper. While that may be fine in theory, in practice it’s a big f*** you to anyone who for whatever reason needs to send them something on paper and struggles to find out how to do that. The rest of this blog posting is my story of exactly that.
I spent literally hours this morning trying to find the definitive answer to this simple question: what postal address should I use if I need to send a letter to Vanguard?
I started looking for the answer to this question while at my bank opening a new IRA to transfer some of my money from Vanguard into. The bank wanted to handle the transfer on my behalf, writing to Vanguard to request the funds and then depositing into my bank IRA account the check Vanguard sends them. So the person at the bank who was helping me asked what mailing address they should use to write to Vanguard.
Notwithstanding the fact that if my bank were larger they would know the answer without asking me (for example, when I transferred part of my IRA from Vanguard to Fidelity I didn’t have to provide Fidelity with an address for Vanguard!), it was a reasonable question, and so I sat there at the bank trying to find the answer on my phone. And trying. And trying.
For about 25 minutes, I dug around inside the public Vanguard web site and the account-holder web site and was unable to find an address. I installed and logged into the Vanguard app on my phone, logged into it, and dug around in there as well, with no luck. Finally I tried to call Vanguard, but after being greeted with a “We’re experiencing a higher than normal call volume, you’re going to have to wait a while” recorded message, I decided that was a no-go. I told the person at bank that I was going to have to go home, find out the address, and call them with it.
Then I repeated this experience at home. No web search, with either Google or DuckDuckGo, or search within the Vanguard web site was able to find a definitive address for banks to send transfer requests to Vanguard. While at one point I did find one form with a mailing address on it, I had no way of confirming that letters sent to that address for other purposes (i.e., not that specific form) would be handled properly.
At long last, I had to bite the bullet and call Vanguard on the phone. I got the “high call volume” message again and accepted an automated offer to have a representative call me back when I got to the front of the line. Someone called me back 24 minutes later. I explained to them what I needed, and they said they were going to put me on hold for one or two minutes while they found the information, and then they put me on hold… for 27 minutes, after which I had to hang up because I had another meeting to go to. Recorded messages that played occasionally during the hold implied to me that in fact the representative had turfed my call back into the queue, presumably because he didn’t know the answer and didn’t want to tank his scores by making me wait for a long time finding it out. Awesome!
I tried again later, once again accepted the offer for a call-back, got a call-back 37 minutes later, waited on hold for several minutes while the representative was looking for the answer to my question, and then, finally, got the answer: the address I’d found on that form hours ago was the correct address for the bank to use.
Here’s where you will not find Vanguard’s mailing address:
- in the footer of their home page;
- on their corporate contact us page linked to from the “contact us” link in the upper right corner of the home page;
- in their support center (at least, not anywhere I could find);
- specifically, not on the “Transferring assets” tab of the “Move money” page in their support center, which says only, “Reach out to the firm you’re transferred your assets to, and they should be able to help you get started,” which I already did, thank you very much;
- on their personal investors home page;
- on a “contact us” page linked to from the personal investors home page (because there isn’t one!);
- on their Broker-Dealer Client Relationship Summary (Form CRS);
- on the personal investor dashboard once you’ve logged in;
- on a “contact us” page linked to from the personal investor dashboard (because there isn’t one!);
- on their logged-in “Transfer cash” page;
- on their logged-in “Withdraw from my Vanguard account” page under the “Transfer cash” page;
- On their “Get a check” page under the “Transfer cash” page;
Once you already know their mailing address, you can find it mentioned all over the place, simply by searching for “Vanguard 982901” in any search engine. Well, kind of.
Many of the pages that match those search terms have the address hidden inside sections of the page that aren’t displayed by default and it isn’t obvious it’s there from looking at the page, so if you stumbled across any of those pages you wouldn’t actually where to find the address on it.
And nearly all the other pages that match those search terms and actually have the address visible are for specific transactions; it never says anywhere on those page that the address can be used for general correspondence.
I did finally find the address documented for general correspondence on the third page of the Vanguard Brokerage Account Agreement PDF. But again, the only way I was able to find that was by searching for “Vanguard 982901”, i.e., I was only able to find the address online once I already knew it.
As I noted at the top of this posting, it seems clear to me at this point that Vanguard has gone out of their way to make it extremely difficult for people to find the answer to the general question, “What address can I use to send a letter to Vanguard?” I suspect there are two reasons for this:
- Online automated transactions are cheaper for them to process.
- They are actively trying to make it hard for people to transfer money out of Vanguard to other institutions.
This sucks.
P.S. A link to and hard copy of this blog posting have been mailed to Vanguard at the above address as a complaint. I will update this posting if I receive any response.
