Charles SchwabReviews of schwab.com

I have run an investment club since 2005, first with Scottrade, then with Ameritrade. It is a very simple operation and both companies allowed me to transfer funds to my bank account to reimburse club members leaving or reducing their exposure. Then I end up with Schwab. Someone left the club and Scwab refused to send the money to my bank account claiming that I had to have an account in the club's name. I actually tried to set up such an account, but banks want to view the club as a company which it is not. Schwab tells me that they don't have an "investment club product". Then they shouldn't have accepted this account in the first place. As it is, I have spent three months trying to access the account and have had to pay someone who left the club from my personal funds. Seriously, what is the downside of them transferring funds to my personal account? Schwab is excessively bureaucratic and has no sense of customer service. I have three accounts with them and am transferring them to Vanguard.

As part of Schwab's acquisition of TD Ameritrade, 11 of my family's 14 brokerages accounts were migrated to Schwab last month. The remaining 3 accounts are actively used trading accounts which rely on TDA Ameritrade's ThinkorSwim trading platform. After arrogantly insisting that they would be migrated too, Schwab finally came to their senses and realized they had NO idea how many much people rely on ThinkorSwim, and how little they (Schwab) know about it. These accounts are now slated to migrate in March 2024- when Schwab hopefully gets their act together. After the initial setup hiccups, annoyingly complicated by their surprising inability to migrate account authorizations from TD Ameritrade, things seemed to have settled down - mainly because these 11 accounts are fairly low-touch. The main gripe I had was that irritatingly pompous and condescending voice on hold, grating out the news, instead of some kind of neutral hold music, or even a more pleasant narration. Today I found out that they haven't honored the commission structure I had with TD Ameritrade, and am being charged commmission for transactions which used to be free under TD. Not cool, Schwab. I'm thinking of moving the acccounts to Morgan Stanley.

Worst bank I've ever come across. I would not trust this bank Charles Schwab with my money!! The technology is completely outdated. I had to call many times to ask questions about my new checking account. Due to technical errors on their side. Took a week and no answers. The account would not let me link an external account to transfer money. Any other bank is a basic feature. I would not trust this bank Charles Schwab with my money!!

I changed jobs 2.5 years ago and have not contributed to my small 18,000 dollar IRA. I have lost over 5% in the time since I stopped contributing. Seems strange. I am not pleased at all.

Zero stars (website requires at least one star, so consider this a charity star). Would not recommend. We were forced to become a Schwab customer as a result of their TDA acquisition. After a bit over a week and over a dozen unanswered requests to Schwab to address the litany of new problems this transition created for us, Dan from the Fresno branch contacted me on 9/13/23. I was hopeful that after the inexcusably bad experiences we’d had initially had, we’d have a better experience working with a local Schwab professional. So I took the time to respond to Dan on 9/14/23, and let him know what we needed from Schwab, in detail. That was over a week ago and still NO follow up from Dan, or anyone else at the Fresno branch. One should reasonably assume that if Dan chose to go on vacation the day after contacting me, Schwab has some degree of redundancy to cover in his absence. But again, NO response after a week. Schwab clearly has no respect for its customers, or the value of their time, or assets invested. I expected changes with the Schwab acquisition of TDA, but what I could not have envisioned was the degree of incompetence, indifference, apathy and straight up contempt with which they've handled the forcible transition of TDA customers, and their complete lack of personal service. Schwab talks a good game in their marketing, but when the rubber meets the road, and it’s time to actually help specific customers with specific issues, they fail miserably, impersonally, and consistently. They appear to see their customers as nothing more than a bunch of account numbers. This experience has been so much worse than I could have imagined – even at the local level, with the total failure of the Fresno branch to even *respond* after they engaged us. Schwab has also failed spectacularly to leverage the technology they purchased from TDA, forcing customers to use their antiquated website, rather than taking advantage of the far superior functionality of the TDA website, and TDA mobile app. Using Schwab is like a time warp into year 2004. Apparently they have neither the desire nor the wherewithal to fix it. I’m sure that Schwab is aware of these problems, but their attitude seems to be "well people will get used to it and stop complaining – let them eat cake". The prevailing attitude at Schwab appears to be “we have $7T in AUM, so we don’t *have* to care”. Not a viable strategy in my view, and I have no idea how they ever got this large treating customers this way. The ONLY smart decision that Schwab has made has been to keep ThinkOrSwim. But I digress. Back to Schwab Fresno. They’ve clearly been well-trained in the corporate culture of apathy and indifference towards customers. Based on the complete absence of a follow up response or any engagement after an entire WEEK, they get an F. Thoroughly unimpressed.

I transferred my accounts to Lynn Mathre, a person I had known years before in her better days. The first meeting she scolded me, warned of financial doom for me and gave me many tasks to do to get my past financial info for her review; immediately. You guessed it; she didn't do a thing re: my investments for 9 months. I finally wised-up and moved to another firm (which also had a difficult transition incldg incorrect information, lost records, repeatedly not listening to me...)only to find that Schwab had interferred with Mathre's office due to other complaints yet they hadn't informed me. I would have retrieved my assets sooner if I had known! The transfer of assets has been very time consuming and difficult. Schwab has given me incorrect information and even withheld 3 accounts after I had asked about them. Schwab has been horrible for me. There's so much more to this report of mishandling of my finances. I no longer know of trustworthy financial institutions. Beware!

I was happy with TD Ameritrade and the transition was supposed to be Soooo easy...just get a Schwab log on and that it...NOT. Just spent 30 mins on the phone...19 of which were just for the guy to validate it was me even after being logged on my via PC AND cell phone and reading him everything he asked for proving it was me He said needs to send me a text but it took him 10 mins to get that text to me and told me I would have to visit an office if it didn't come through which is Ridiculous (if he was smart, he wouldn't have said that until I wasn't able to get text as that pissed me off severly). Then I finally get to ask my first question 20 mins into the call asking if I can still use my TD Ameritrade checks...he said no, and that I was sent them a few weeks ago (not true)... transfers me...and next guy says their system didn't show me as activated for checking so they didn't send them (BS... I have always had and used checks on TD for a decade). Further all the links about information for the transition won't load on their site saying PDF download error and I put in a search field a question and it locked up the website and I had to refresh. I am 30 mins into using this company and I already hate them, don't trust their website and now I am still have to do forms for checking and more. ****9/21 Just thought to check that my beneficiary transferred with my account...and NOPE...another ball dropped... thankfully I check or account would have been stuck in probate!

My company chose this bank for the ESOP program. If you are an internal company or customer considering using Schwab: don't! Reasons: - Unclear and broken W-8Ben form submission process (for +3 years running now) leaving internationals hanging in risk territory tax wise - Zero understanding of Locale issues: comma vs dot as decimal on phones causes numbers to randomly be displayed AT LEAST 3 orders of magnitude WRONG in EITHER direction (depending if value is above otlr below 1,000.00$) - No ability to change Language settings except for changing them for the entire phone - Wire transfers that cost 15$ which are randomly re-embursed but unavoidable for internationals - Random needs to make wire transfers via phone, where the numbers are given so unclearly that it's hard to tell what exuberant currency exchange fee Schwab will take, compared to Wise or Revolt. - A UX chaos from last century, with glaring bugs in it that will make you unable to find open orders when you need to quickly adjust them when you most need to. - A CSV export so outside the standard that requires writing your own importer code (including manual parsing, forget existing DLLs) to make usable. - A UX so bad that it will make you miss how many shares you actually hold. - No bug reporting process, no ability to take screenshots but the need to attach something for every communication via the mobile app. - Super slow response times, constant webrequest timeouts or website outages. - A dev/support team that thinks all of this is By Design All in all: you're practically guaranteed to loose money and sink more time into this than you would've ever thought possible.