A lot of people like to use the Fidelity Cash Management Account in place of an ordinary checking account. Unfortunately, beginning a few days ago the account has been wonky with deposits, transfers and bill payments.
Many people are seeing recently that their Fidelity Cash Management Account (CMA) is holding funds on their ACH pulls into the account. When initiating from within a Fidelity a pull from an external bank account, Fidelity will quote an availability date of a few weeks later instead of the typical timeframe of a day or a few days. Even funds pushed into the Fidelity account from an outside account are occasionally getting held up for a few people.
Many reports indicate mobile check deposits being even more problematic with long hold times until the checks clear.
Most surprisingly, some people report getting their bill payments cancelled, e.g. if you have your mortgage set up to be paid from within the Fidelity bill payment system it might not actually get paid.
These measures are all likely fraud algorithms trying to keep criminals at bay. That said, it’s frustrating that Fidelity isn’t doing a better job communicating with their customers. If this continues it can render the CMA no longer suitable as a checking account alternative. Note: many have noted that only transfers to the CMA are sometimes slow while transfers to the brokerage account directly don’t seem to have these issues.
All of these issues seem to be affecting more often those CMAs which are on the newer side. You can read more about user experiences in this DoC comments thread and on this long Reddit thread. Let us know your own experiences in the comments below.
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Just looked for myself, when initiating a transfer on Fidelity the “See your estimated transfer times” button doesn’t do anything and the confirmation page says up to 5 business days, but I have 2 transactions into the account on September 18 where “Available to withdraw” on my account’s balances page says they'll be released on October 10. Half of the balance being held was a pull, half was a push, but they’re being treated the same. I’ve got a big push coming into the account on Monday, was NOT expecting that to get held for a fucking month.
Yep, my transfer to CMA still not available from Sep 12.
A bit strange but I’ve had the opposite this past week. Normally when I pull from another bank into CMA it adds the amount to “available to trade” but not to “available to withdraw” for a week. Recently I’ve noticed funds from transfers have been available to withdraw after 2-3 days instead of a week.
Okay so I was tripping out randomly. I pulled funds from another account on 9/18 like I have always done, and I just checked that it would take until 10/10 to clear. Absolutely ridiculous!
I've been pulling from Chase to Fidelity CMA for over a year, maybe more, accounts have been open over 10 years. I just started noticing that they put a 7 day hold on withdrawals, and I was miffed. Looking back, as of late june the email alert says "You can now trade your transferred money" but withdrawal is 1 to 6 business days. Before that it was EFT received, "no further action is required on your part"
Why use Fidelity bill pay to pay your mortgage when you can just set up your mortgage to debit from your CMA?
The idea is to limit the info you give out. I personally just set up auto pay on the bills but some people like to do bill pay from one place.
Makes sense, but I've been burned with bill pay a few times. For me, it's worth having the comfort that comes with auto debit, especially with something like a mortgage payment.
My advice for anyone using a Fidelity CMA account is that it is good for ACH pushes to other bank accounts since they go out in 1 day.
However for depositing funds into your Fidelity CMA account, I would advise doing a bank push into your CMA account to avoid the long hold duration.
Whenever I needed to deposit funds into my CMA account, I only do ACH pushes from an external bank into my CMA account to avoid these hold durations.
Except that many external banks have too low ACH limits. I can pull in $100k in Fidelity, but not push out at many banks.
It seems this varies case by case. Both P1 and P2 deposited a $5 check from the same credit union to Fidelity yesterday. P1's funds are available the next day, while P2's $5 will be available on 10/09/2024!
Made a 3k deposit on 9/13 originally said 9/20 as the release date, now says 10/5. Called in they said nothing they can or will do. 22 days for a release is insane, account is 6 months old made dozens of deposits without issue. Very frustrating since the funds were taken out on 9/13, I know for a fact they've cleared.
I haven't seen any issues with ach transfers. After reading the article and looking I do see that my check deposit limit is $1,000. I also very rarely deposit checks and don't think I've ever done so in the fidelity account so I can see why mine was probably dropped.