Guides › Switching Financial Advisors
Updated September 19, 2026. Quick answer: you open the account at the receiving firm and sign the transfer form there; the new firm pulls the account through ACATS. If your account was opened at Lincoln Financial Advisors it became an Osaic FA account, and if it was opened at Lincoln Financial Securities it became an Osaic FS account: Osaic completed its acquisition of Lincoln’s wealth-management broker-dealers on May 6, 2024, and the old Lincoln-branded fee schedule no longer exists as an independent document. Both of those Osaic entities have since been terminated themselves, so the schedule Osaic publishes for these accounts today is its 2026 Client Brokerage Fee Schedule for NFS Accounts, effective February 1, 2026. That schedule prices a non-retirement outgoing account transfer at $150, retirement-account termination at $125, and the annual fee on a commission-based IRA at $35, with $0 on an investment-advisory IRA.
The published numbers
Every figure below comes from Osaic’s own 2026 Client Brokerage Fee Schedule for NFS Accounts, effective February 1, 2026, fetched on September 19, 2026 from the disclosures page on osaic.com. It supersedes the Osaic FS schedule dated October 1, 2024 that this page quoted before.
| What it charges | Amount | How it is charged |
|---|---|---|
| Outgoing Account Transfer Fee (Non-Retirement Account) | $150.00 | Per transaction, includes an Osaic Wealth markup on the fee NFS itself charges |
| Account Termination (Retirement Account Fees table) | $125.00 | Per transaction |
| IRA, Rollover, Roth, SEP, SIMPLE, commission-based account | $35.00 | Annual; $0 on an investment-advisory IRA |
If you remember being a Lincoln Financial client, this is the schedule Osaic publishes for these accounts today. Osaic’s own press materials and industry coverage confirm Lincoln Financial Advisors Corporation and Lincoln Financial Securities Corporation ceased to exist as independent broker-dealers on May 6, 2024, rebranded Osaic FA and Osaic FS. The old Lincoln-branded fee-disclosure PDF now returns a server error on lincolnfinancial’s own site, and its last archived snapshot predates the merger by nearly a decade: too stale to cite. Both of those successors have since been terminated themselves. FINRA BrokerCheck lists Osaic FA, Inc. (CRD 3978) and Osaic FS, Inc. (CRD 3870) with firm status Terminated as of March 30, 2025 and no approved FINRA, SEC, SRO or state registrations, and the SEC’s Investment Adviser Public Disclosure shows each firm’s investment-adviser registration terminated effective January 28, 2025; both checked on September 19, 2026. The schedule quoted above is the one Osaic publishes today for accounts custodied at NFS, and its own markup footnote names Osaic Wealth, Inc. (CRD 23131), which is active on both registries. Osaic does not publish a document mapping each former Lincoln account to a surviving entity, so check your statement or ask your Osaic representative which Osaic firm holds your account before assuming this schedule applies to it.
The document does not itemize a separate “partial transfer” fee distinct from the flat outgoing-transfer and account-termination figures shown.
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Source: WiserAdvisor’s service descriptionThe sequence
1. Pull a current statement for every account, showing the exact registration, account numbers and complete holdings list. 2. Check the holdings for anything that will not move. Ask the receiving firm directly: “Can you hold every position on this statement?” Anything they cannot hold has to be sold, and in a taxable account that is a realised gain in the year you switch: the categories that commonly do not transfer. 3. Open the receiving account and sign the transfer form there. Under FINRA Rule 11870 the delivering firm then has one business day to validate and three business days after validation to complete. 4. Send a dated termination letter for the record, the generator writes it, and confirm in writing that billing has stopped.
Two things to get right
Cost basis. Under IRC §6045A the delivering broker must furnish a transfer statement carrying basis for covered securities within 15 days of the transfer. Keep your final statements anyway, and check the first statement at the new firm for positions showing a missing or zero basis. Retirement accounts move as a direct transfer, trustee to trustee, not as a distribution to you. Why that distinction matters. Budget $150 for the exit charge and leave the cash to cover it in the account rather than sweeping the balance to zero first. Whether the fee is worth paying at all is a question of what you are moving to: our benchmark of published adviser fee schedules puts the weighted median annual cost near $2,000 to $2,500 on $250,000: the benchmark. The general mechanics: switching financial advisors. To put the exit charge next to the fee you would stop paying, the switching advisors cost calculator returns the break-even in months.
Want to know what Osaic charges before you decide whether to leave? See the dollar breakdown from Osaic’s own fee disclosure.
Before you decide to leave Osaic, check whether it owes you a fiduciary duty in the first place.
Weighing whether to move ahead? Read the full Osaic review, including its fiduciary status and what it costs to leave.
Six more exits, each with a firm-named custodian and a confirmed transfer figure: Cresset Asset Management, IEQ Capital, MAI Capital Management, Lido Advisors, Steward Partners Investment Advisory, and Sanctuary Wealth.
Leaving a different firm? See the exit guides for all 189 firms, with the four steps every exit shares.