How do I change an individual investing account into a joint or trust account?

How it works

You can change most individual investing accounts to joint ownership in your online account. Changing accounts to the ownership of trusts is not yet available.

In order to change the ownership of your account’s assets, you’ll technically be creating a new account, transferring the assets into it in-kind, then closing the old account. Don’t worry: we’ll handle these steps for you automatically.

Transferring assets in-kind between Wealthfront accounts with different owners is not supported.

Which accounts are included

You can now change the following accounts from individual to joint ownership:

• Automated Index Investing
• Automated Bond Portfolio
• S&P 500 Direct
• Nasdaq-100 Direct

Ownership can’t be changed for accounts with an outstanding Portfolio Line of Credit balance or B-Notice. Changing ownership of Automated Bond Ladder Accounts and Stock Investing Accounts is not yet available. Ownership of IRAs also can’t be changed.

How to change ownership

1. On your dashboard, select the account whose ownership you want to change.
2. Select “Manage” and go to “Ownership settings”.
3. Click the row showing the owner to begin the process of changing ownership.

After collecting basic info about your co-owner, we’ll ask you to confirm or update your financial information and review your risk questionnaire. If things have changed, we may share new tax or risk levels that seem more appropriate to your new situation. Accepting these suggested changes may result in taxable events, but you don’t have to accept them in order to change ownership.

Completing the change

Once you confirm your choices, we’ll create your new joint account and initiate the transfer. Your account should be funded within about 2 business days of submitting the request. After the transfer is finished, we’ll invite your co-owner and close your original account.

Will I lose any info from my old account?

Account preferences: Your portfolio type, Tax-Loss Harvesting settings, stock restrictions, cost basis, automated transfers, and dividend sweeping preferences will all carry over to your new account.

Statements & performance history: You’ll still be able to access statements from your closed account, and may have two sets of tax documents for the tax year in which you make the change. 

There is some info that you’ll lose, like your historical return percentages, record of harvested tax losses, and performance graph. If you want to preserve these, we recommend screenshotting them before initiating the ownership change.

You’ll also need to re-assign your account’s beneficiaries for the new account.

Can I remove an account owner from an investing account?

While an account holder cannot be removed from an existing Wealthfront account in general, we can help change the ownership from joint to individual in certain circumstances, such as death or divorce. For either of these scenarios, you can fill out this form.