Edward Jones - Financial Advisor: Federico Bejar, CEPA®

Verified by yext

I started this review a few days ago but thought I'd give it more time to see if things resolved and they unfortunately have not. My husband's IRA is trapped at Edward Jones and we are having a really tough time getting it transferred. I don't place all of the blame on Federico (Freddy) for the mess we're in, maybe if he worked for a different company things would be better. We were friends before we became clients and had a falling out which is why we are trying to switch companies, it was actually per his request. It's a long back story, but not entirely relevant at this point so I'll save the soap opera.

We had sent a few messages through the EJ portal asking how to go about transferring and whether we could move my husband's account to his current employer's investment company. After being ignored, we sent another message. Come to find out, Edward Jones had cut off all of our communication with Freddy. They are intercepting our messages to him but they don't respond. They eventually responded and directed us to contact a 1-800 number (with very long wait times) for help transferring our money. We finally got our new investment firm to send transfer paperwork directly to Edward Jones on our behalf on July 13th. Within days, my account was liquidated and transferred, while my husband's remained.

There are long wait times due to "higher than normal call volume" literally every time we call the 1-800. We waited on hold several times with and when we finally got through their computers crashed. We were simply trying to find out what the hold up was with my husband's transfer. When I was finally able to talk to someone, they refused to speak to me because my account had been closed so I was no longer listed on our formerly joint account. We tried the online messaging system again just begging for a point of contact and they swiftly disabled our login.

We eventually found out on 7-25 that, although everything was initially sent together, they didn't receive my husband's paperwork. We again faxed my husband's transfer paperwork on 7-25 asking for a confirmation of receipt, and our new investment firm sent it again 7-26 as well. They will only accept faxes, not emails or online uploads that would likely be more reliable. I'd prefer to just hand it all to someone in person, but we are not allowed to do that either. However, my husband's account still has not been liquidated as of today, 7-28 and we never received confirmation anything was even received.

I'd appreciate a confirmation that the paperwork was at least received. We don't have time to call every day and wait on hold just to ask if a fax went through. My daughter was just in the hospital, we both work, we have busy schedules. We just want our money. We would so greatly appreciate some sort of human contact that we can deal with directly. Again, I think this is mostly out of Freddy's hands as he is a decent human, but just use caution in working with this company altogether.