How to Switch Financial Advisors: The Actual Transfer Process

• Pull your last 2-3 statements from every account you're considering moving.
• Get a full list of current holdings, including any annuities, proprietary funds, or non-traded positions.
• Confirm cost basis records exist for taxable accounts. Most brokerages report this automatically, but it's worth checking before, not after, a transfer.
• Check any annuity or insurance contract for its surrender schedule, most run 6-10 years and decline over time.

ACAT is the industry-standard system brokerages use to move accounts between firms without you having to sell anything and re-buy it at the new firm. Once you open an account at the receiving firm and sign a transfer request, the receiving firm submits the request through the ACAT system, and the sending firm has a set window to respond.

• In-kind transfer. Stocks, ETFs, and most widely held mutual funds move as-is. No sale, no capital gains event, no re-purchase.
• Cash transfer. Cash balances move directly.
• Timeline. A standard in-kind ACAT transfer typically completes in 5-10 business days once submitted.

• Proprietary or firm-branded funds. Many large firms build in-house mutual funds that other custodians won't hold. These typically have to be liquidated or exchanged into a comparable fund before or during the transfer.
• Annuities. These move through a 1035 exchange, a separate tax-free exchange process, not ACAT, and any remaining surrender charge applies regardless of which process is used.
• Employer-sponsored plans. A 401(k) or 403(b) requires a rollover, governed by the plan administrator's rules, not a brokerage-to-brokerage ACAT transfer.
• Non-traded and alternative investments. Non-traded REITs, BDCs, and some private placements have their own redemption windows, which can take weeks or months and sometimes carry early-redemption penalties.

An in-kind ACAT transfer itself is not a taxable event. The tax exposure comes from what has to happen around it: liquidating a position that can't transfer in kind realizes any embedded gain at that point, and reallocating a portfolio into a new strategy immediately after arriving at the new firm can trigger gains that had nothing to do with the transfer itself. A careful transfer plan separates the two: what moves in kind with no tax consequence, and what has to be sold, with the gain identified and planned for before it happens rather than discovered on next year's 1099.