r/personalfinance

Wife recently started a job at Wells Fargo Advisors and was super excited due to career growth opportunities. This is currently a non-licensed (registered?) position within the company. To our surprise (or mine at least), her compliance group is stating that I need to transfer all of my brokerage and IRA (Traditional and Roth) accounts over to the Wells Fargo platform within 60 days. They are stating this is for FINRA 3210.

Searching through previous posts here, this doesn't appear out of the norm in the finance industry. However, I'm looking for some clarity / advise on the below:

1. Does FINRA apply to non-registered (not sure if this is the correct term) employees?

2. If they require her to complete series 7 / 63 examinations in the future, would FINRA apply now or once she completes that registration?

3. When I disclosed my accounts, there mentioned of exemptions. However, the WF link to those exemptions didn't work. Anyone know what are typical exemptions? Is this company specific? For instance, my IRA accounts are mutual funds at Vanguard.

4. Do I have any rights here from a legal perspective (i.e. is there any disclosures they need to provide me so I understand why I'm being asked to do this)?

My wife doesn't want to cause any waves since she just started this position. However, I'm pretty frustrated here. I've had these accounts since before our relationship and they're solely in my name. I want to ask questions (for instance, could I send them monthly statements instead?) but the compliance team there only communicates with her.

I don't work in the finance industry so FINRA and these compliance requirements are all new to me. Any advice or feedback is much appreciated!

I am in a massive financial mess right now and I need some brutal advice on how to handle this. Back in 2023, my long-time buddy needed a car to get to his new job but his credit was absolute trash. I had a solid 790 score, so I stupidly agreed to co-sign a loan for a used Mazda. He was making the payments fine for the first two years, or at least that is what he told me every time I asked. I stopped checking the account online because everything seemed entirely under control .

Fast forward to this week. My wife and I are trying to buy our first house and we finally found a place. I went to get our mortgage pre-approval finalized, but the loan officer called me back with a flat out denial. My credit score plummeted down to 620. I looked at the report and discovered my friend missed four consecutive payments late last year. The account was practically on the verge of repossession before he caught up on the balance last month.

He never mentioned a single word about being broke or missing payments. When I confronted him yesterday, he just gave me some weak excuse about changing bank accounts and forgetting to set up the auto-pay. He claims everything is fine now because the account is current, but the damage to my credit profile is already done.

The underwriting team for the mortgage says they cannot clear us with those recent major delinquencies on my report. Our contract on the house has a financing contingency, but we are about to lose our dream home because of this. Is there any legal or financial mechanism to get these missed payments removed from my history since I was not the primary driver? Can I force the lender to take my name off the loan completely if he refinances?

I know I am the idiot here for co-signing in the first place, but I genuinely thought I was helping a guy out. Now my own family is paying the price for his negligence.

Hi, here's the situation I find myself in:

I drive a 2017 Subaru Forester with 143,000 miles. I have a long commute to work and put about 27,000 miles on annually. I had to buy high during the worst of the COVID years due to life events and owe $13,580 with 3 years left on my loan, monthly payment of $420. At the time I also was not commuting as far as I am now, so the mileage wasn't a worry (I bought at 55,000).

The car is turning into a money pit. I just had to replace my CVT valve body in November for $1700, and now my torque converter is slipping and will eventually let go. There is no saying exactly when this will happen. If it fails, it is a $4800 repair and the car is worth nothing.

My problem is that the car is only worth $5500 or so trade in, so I'm severely upside down. I have some people telling me it is worth it to buy new and roll in the $7500 or so to avoid further maintenance costs and to trade in while the car still has any value, but I can't bring myself to believe that is the right course of action. I told myself I would never shop for a car with my back against the wall again because that is exactly how I got into this situation.

What is everyone's opinion? Thanks

Edit: Just wanted to add that in my opinion going further upside on a new vehicle is a bad idea, but I have family members insisting my math is wrong so I wanted to collect additional opinions.

Edit 2: Thanks for the responses everyone. I will move forward with my original plan of driving the Subaru until it is paid off. For those saying I should move closer to my job, I wish that was a possibility but unfortunately the combination of my wife's demanding schedule and having a young child make that unrealistic for the time being.

My kid, 1.5 years old, gets monetary gifts here and there. Not much, but she’s got a few hundred in cash. I want it to be money she can spend as she grows up, and also want to use it to teach her fiscal responsibility. I don’t want it sitting in a piggy bank. What should I do with it?

I know this is a touchy subject but I figured I'd ask and I can't be the only one who is concerned.

The main concern is the world is on fire and the stock market might take a turn for the worst. With the housing market bubble, AI Bubbles and stuff just getting insane. We are concerned we could lose money. Me and my husband are debating about pulling most out of it to put it into a house. I know everyone says not to pull out early because of the taxes and possibly not qualifying and the 10% hint for taking funds out early.

We already have a loan out so we can't do that for a new home. We can pull out 10k for closing costs without an issue.

What's the lesser of the two evils? Losing money to the market or taxes / new house?

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I have a guaranteed income of $4,500 a month from the VA. My wife is a tenured teacher and my work needs to give you 6 months notice if let go. Our monthly expenses are around 5k. I like to keep around 25k in a HYSA. My question is could I lower my emergency funds and invest more?

I hear time in the market beats DCA but everyone online seems to be saying that stock prices are too expensive right now? Any advice?

We bought our house from my wife’s grandmother last year for 161k at 6.625 rate. We now owe 158k. The house appraised for 350k

We make 80k combined but we have a ton of debt from before the mortgage and we’ve taken on more since just getting the house on better shape.

We’re looking to do a 225k cashout refinance that would pay off all of our debts and allow us to also put 20k into savings/cds etc. The new rate goes up to 6.75%. And our payment(p&i, escrow, and pmi) $1320 would go to $1694(p&i, escrow, no longer have pmi).

Our debts are
$694. Personal loan($22k)
5 credit cards totaling $8k
1 balance transfer ($8500) good for 16 more months.
Student loan(10k) $100 a month
1 car. (20,700)$698 payment.
1 car (1500) $229 payment.

We’ve stopped using the cards but the damage is already there.

What should we do?

Married, Dual Income, no kids. We are trying desperately for kids and spouse will probably stop working when they're born depending on how realistic that is, I.e. the economy, childcare, etc.

Right now my "essentials" for 6 months adds up to just shy of $27,000. I used things that I know I couldn't live without - food, water, shelter, required bills, money making bills, etc. And then I added about $500/month for a ACA plan for 6 months.

All together my goal has been about $30,000 for 6 months expenses.

My question to y'all is does that sound right? It seems kinda high to me... I have friends with a home telling me their 6 months is more like $15k.

To make matters worse I plugged my budget into Chatgpt and it said with my plan (future single income, first kid), I should in fact have $60k-70k saved up.

I'm open to a reality check please!

Hello,

I am trying to maximize my retirement contributions.

I am currently on target to contribute $24,500 to retirement account as part of my 401k (without including my employer contributions). Along with this I have also contributed $7000 to Roth (backdoor).

I have read the contribution limit for 2026 (including roth) is $24,500. Am I at the risks of over contributing for 2026?

Thanks.

A few years ago I used to think financial stability meant owning a house, big savings, investments, all that. Now honestly it feels more like being able to go through a month without stressing about every unexpected expense. Feels like the definition changed a lot recently, at least for me

Throwaway for obvious reasons.

I'm 36M, married with 3 kids.

• Salary:
  • 135k / 0
• HYSA: "Emergency Fund"
  • 40k / 0
• 401k:
  • Contribution: 15% + 10% match (Min 8%)
  • 393.9k / 0
• HSA:
  • Contribution: MAX (8750)
  • Invested: 15.8k / 0
  • Holding: 2.5k (Minimum)
• ROTH IRA:
  • Contribution: MAX (7500)
  • 16.8k / 33k
• Mortgage:
  • 165k remaining @ 3.375%
• Car/Van Loan:
  • 45k remaining @ 5%

Currently paying down the car loan asap. If I'd like to retire early would starting taxable brokerage account be something to do on top? Is there anything else I should do?

I'm not even sure if I'm on track (maybe I am but not to my retirement goal?)

Thanks in advance. I was never taught finance so a lot of this is just me trying not to become my parents.

I have always been really smart about my money. Never spending too much, always providing for myself, investments, etc.

Over the past year because of depression, enabling myself and pure laziness, I’ve let a lot of these principles go. I know its not as bad as it could be, but I’m really feeling it right now and want someone to just tell me how bad I’m screwed.

I had a pet that I spoiled for 6 months before rehoming her (TLDR she had severe issues I could not behaviorally help with and she is with someone much more suited to help her now) and I also let my spending habits on credit cards get bad.

The worst thing that I did was accidentally let a Spectrum bill go to collections. I paid it this month and it was only $150. Now it is affecting my life. I’m re-applying to live in my apartment with my best friend (we already live here) and it is being flagged even though I have already paid it. My best friend has limited credit history so we may be screwed because I was the one who was approved last year. Now we are both denied and trying to appeal our credit screen for various reasons (mine has something else in collections that should never have been sent and the company is correcting it, and my best friend should have enough credit history).

But I just feel so defeated. Why couldn’t I just pay the damn Spectrum bill? Why did I ignore it until it went to freaking collections? And now we may have to move out of our dream apartment because of it. I am trying to bounce back financially (credit cards) and know I will. Now knowing one stupid mistake will be on my credit for 7 years is destroying me inside. I feel so stupid

We are struggling. We have high rent and child care and those are non negotiables right now. So don’t even suggest those as it’s not feasible at the moment.

We are going to really try to reel in our extra spending - subscriptions, meals out, etc.

We have about 15K of credit card debt. We are very depleted on our cash. We have a HYSA with $1600.
I have 15K in an old 401K from a previous job. $200,000+ in my 403B. And I also get a pension for work.

I make about 175K a year. Husband ebbs and flows with his income as he is in freelancing. But usually makes 130K.

My take home pay is about 3300-4,000 biweekly. Lots of it goes to bills (child care and rent) so it’s hard to get the debt down and still have the cash we need for bills.

What would you do?

Take penalties and just throw some of the 401K to the debt, take a small loan, put the debt on a no interest card for a little and just try our best to get it down??

We are early mid 30s for reference.

I am 16 and don't know a lot about investing. I only heard that if you want long term profits you should invest into ETF's and also that you should diversify. I've been working for a while now and I have 3500eur saved up for investing. Should I just put it all into one ETF or should I also invest in things like Crypto or single Stocks?

I’ve recently (at the top of this year) financed a car through capital one. Haven’t had one complaint up until recently. Me and my wife had our 2nd anniversary trip planned, but a week before we were scheduled to leave I had to replace our furnace that was 4k and fix a gas leak I had which was another 700. I wanted to cancel since our spending budget was completely shot but everything was paid for so I decided to allocate our money for liquidity instead. In doing so I found out capital one allows for you to break your payments up if needed. Since me doing this would free up about 500 for us to spend on the trip and I pay the second half 3 days into the vacation once my check hit I utilized that option. Only for me to keep getting spam notifications on vacation about missing my payment, late fees being assessed and how I’m behind on my note. Even though the second half of payment was already scheduled to come out so they see I had plans to pay it. I reached out and they told me that since it wasn’t the full amount I was technically late and by the time I made the second half of the payment a $25 late fee would be charged. Moving forward I’m going to just do what I normally do and pay it once a month but I really think they should inform the consumer that if you don’t pay the whole amount in one payment, there will be consequences, even if they offer breaking it up or if you have future payments scheduled

I am 23 years old and up until this point I have not been too concerned with saving my money. That being said, I have been financially educating myself more and more over the last few days and keep hearing about a high-yield savings account from what I’m understanding. It’s better to have money in a high-yield savings account so that way it can slowly build on its own overtime if I keep up with it. This all being said, I did research online and found that Varo has a promotion being ran where after receiving $1000 direct deposit in the account and keeping the account in a positive standing you are rewarded with a 5% APY on the savings account borrow offers up until $5000. I’m considering opening a Varo account to capitalize on this and then planning on moving over to Ally after that $5000 APY cap comes into play. Any thoughts?

Hello.

My husband and I are buying a home soon.

Our money is split between our accounts.

The loan is going into my name only. He will not be on the financing.

He will need to give me around 80k. I assume this counts as a "gift" for downpayment.

My question is, do they check his bank account also when he has to give the gift for down payment?

I only ask cause he is about to make a large purchase of over 14K for vacation property ( in his name only from his own bank account )

Wondering if that will be a problem

Thanks!

A cousin opening debt in your name is identity theft or at least IMO it is. Do not let guilt make it your problem, freeze your credit and report the fraud. That's all there is to it

My wife and I are planning on purchasing our first house this fall and I'm looking around for the best offers. What are the pros and cons between Advia, Lake Michigan Credit Union, University of Michigan Credit Union, Geniysis Credit Union.