Personally I would if practical change brokerages. $20 is huge, I pay $1.70 minimum or 0.08% with interactive brokers.
I've looked at the website. What do you pays in fees? It shows that monthly fee is $20 pm? And you need $100k invested with them. How do you claim back your 15% dividend tax if the tax rate in USA is 30% on dividends?
If you have less than $100k invested then there's a minimum fee of $10 per month. Your trading costs are part of this, so if you trade for $6 a month, you'll need to pay an extra $4 at month end. If you have over $100k there's no monthly fee. I'm fortunate enough to be in this group. We have a double tax treaty with the USA, so you will only be taxed 15% on dividends. I don't know how it works because I just buy VWRD which has the tax taken off at source.
Sorry for popping in while you guys are busy discussing dividends, but I was just wondering how did you go about starting to invest in that specific fund? Are you from the states or currently residing there?
Say for instance one wants to also invest in a specific Vanguard fund. How does one go about doing that?
If i understood the question correctly, all you need is to open a brokerage account that offers international stocks and ETFs. The ones I know are Standard Bank Webtrader (fees 0.25% pa - too high), ABSA Word Trader (fees 0.1% pa), Sanlam iTrade (fees 0,25% pa) and Saxo Bank (no fees - but minimum initial amount required by Saxo Bank is $10,000 but all the other guys require a minimum initial amount of $1,000). When you brokerage is up and running, you can simply transfer the money to the brokers bank account then you good to go. To buy Vanguard ETFs, just enter the name of the ETF you want to buy then click buy. That's just about it