White Oak has experienced significant growth in the past few years, increasing both our number of clients and amount of assets under management. Therefore, we are happy to report that last August, White Oak shifted its registration from North Carolina (and other relevant states) to the Securities and Exchange Commission.  In doing so, we updated the required regulatory documents provided to clients, which are linked here.  Included is the new easy-to-read disclosure form called the Customer Relationship Summary, or Form CRS.  If you have any questions, please get in touch.

Fidelity Core Transaction Account Option Change

You likely received an email from Fidelity last week regarding the above-titled action. Here’s what that means for you:

Up until this change we were able to specify that cash coming into a taxable account (deposit, proceeds of a stock sale, interest or dividend) would automatically go into a money market fund. (The change does not apply to qualified accounts like IRAs.) Fidelity changed it so that incoming cash now goes into a fund called FCASH.  FCASH does earn interest – better than a bank – but not as good as the money market funds we use.

To get around this issue, we run reports at least once a week to look for accounts that have funds sitting in FCASH, then we manually move it over to the money market fund.  Clients may lose a few days of the higher interest rate from the money market fund, but we are at the mercy of Fidelity.  We are, however, working to develop other processes to get the funds moved more quickly.

Beneficiary Review

If you have beneficiaries named on your account(s), it’s a good idea to review those on occasion. If you’d like to know who your beneficiaries are, please call or email. We can handle beneficiary changes by electronic signature or regular mail using a Fidelity form. If you have an Individual or Joint account and have not already done so, you can designate beneficiaries on those as well.

Statement Householding

If you receive paper statements and have more than one account, you can household your statements so that they will come combined in one statement in one envelope. If you would like to do this, let us know. The form to set up householding can be signed electronically or by mail. You can household your accounts even if you go online to review them. We can help you switch from paper to electronic delivery if you’d like.

Connecting your Bank Account to your Fidelity Accounts

If you would like to connect your bank account and your Fidelity accounts for ease of money transfers to and from, please let us know. Having standing instructions in place reduces the time for transfers and saves on wiring fees. These can be set up using a picture of a check or bank statement and a Fidelity form that can be signed electronically.