When your money just vanishes

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Last week, the New York Times published a story that I couldn't get out of my head.

Marta Gruntmane, 35, a Physician Assistant in Eagle, Colorado, gets a message from Fidelity Investments one Friday morning before Easter: her phone number and email address have been removed from her profile. She logs in. Account balance: zero dollars. Three accounts gone. Tens of thousands of dollars. The Roth IRA her father opened when she was 16 — she's been contributing regularly for almost 20 years. All gone.

She calls Fidelity. They tell her she doesn't have any accounts with them.

"Are you sure you shouldn't be calling Schwab?"

Even the fraud department refuses to help. If there are no accounts, there can't be any fraud. Logical.

After an hour on the phone, she gets two options: Send a letter by mail. Or drive two and a half hours to the nearest branch in Denver. She cancels her 20 patients and gets in the car.

On the drive through Vail, she calls her mother. Her mother suggests trying the fraud department again. This time she gets someone who actually listens. She gives him an account number she found in her paperwork. Another hour on the phone. In the end, he promises to look into it — probably a system issue.

Later, a back-office specialist calls and confirms: system error. Fix within 24 hours. It took six days.

What happened? Gruntmane had originally opened her account with a Tax ID because she was a Permanent Resident back then. When she recently opened a Custodial Roth IRA for her daughter with her Social Security Number, the system didn't merge her profiles properly. Add to that an old employer profile she'd never activated. The system got tangled up and made everything invisible.

The money was there the whole time, Fidelity says. Her budget app even kept showing the correct balance. You just couldn't access it. For six days.

I read the article and the first thing I did after was get written confirmation of my account balances from my bank. Just like that, for peace of mind. My situation is different — I know the people at my bank personally, they know me and my situation. That's a luxury you don't get with an online broker with millions of customers.

What shocked me most wasn't the technical error. Stuff like that happens. What shocked me was the reaction afterward. A customer service that can't see anything, can't escalate anything, and tells a woman she might be imagining things. Six days without access to your own money, and nobody who can tell you why.

Print out your bank statements. Sounds old-fashioned, I don't care.

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