Your Brokerage Wants 10 Business Days to Sit on Your Withdrawal. If You Are 65, the Ask Is 145.

If the SEC signs off on what is sitting in front of it right now, you’ll be able to ask your brokerage to move your money and have it simply not go.

Not because a judge said so. Because someone there formed a “reasonable belief” that you’re being scammed. Ten business days, and the money stays put.

That is proposed FINRA Rule 2166, filed with the SEC on August 20 and published in the Federal Register on September 9. It covers “a natural person age 18 and older,” which is everyone. Not seniors, not people a firm thinks are impaired. You.

The firm owes you a phone call or a letter within two business days telling you the delay exists, why, and how to reach someone about it. That is the whole safeguard.

Now the part nobody put in a headline.

The same filing takes the existing senior-protection hold, Rule 2165, and stretches its ceiling from 55 business days to 145. Three more 30-business-day extensions, stacked. If you are 65 or older, or an adult your firm believes cannot protect their own interests, your disbursement can sit for roughly seven calendar months.

Here’s what they’re not telling you. Read FINRA’s own justification for that number and it argues against itself. The evidence is a survey of member firms FINRA ran in 2020. From the filing: “the majority of matters are resolved within the current maximum of 55 business days,” and about 28 percent of firms hit a matter that ran past 50 days. So the cap nearly triples, on six-year-old data, to cover the cases that are already the exception.

Split the verdict, because these are two different rules.

The 10-day speed bump is smart. A wire to a romance scammer is gone the second it lands, and ten days is the difference between a delay you complain about and a retirement account you never see again. Take the inconvenience.

The 145-business-day version is questionable. Your money keeps earning whatever it was earning, so this is not a yield problem, it is an access problem, and seven months is long enough to miss a closing, a medical bill, or a tax payment. A ceiling that long should rest on something newer than a 2020 survey.

Two things to do, and the first one takes five minutes.

Name a trusted contact on every brokerage account you hold. FINRA’s own survey data says about 42 percent of investors have one, and among those who do not, 81 percent do not recall ever being asked. That matters more under these rules than it did last month: the first extension past 55 business days requires the firm to notify your trusted contact. No trusted contact, nobody gets the call. The filing would also let firms call it an “emergency contact” and apply one person across all your accounts.

Second, if the 145 number bothers you, say so. Comments on file number SR-FINRA-2026-018 are due to the SEC on or before September 30, 2026. The industry will be writing. Almost nobody holding the account will.

Maryland is doing a narrower version of this to bank accounts on October 1, capped at 25 business days, and we walked through that one here. If you are deciding where cash you might actually need should live, the savings hub and our picks are the place to start.

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