I have about 10 years old 401k account in Vanguard. About the time when I left the job, I had citizenship and there, changed my name from "First-Name" to "Firstname". Basically removed the hyphen in between the syllables as I found it was rather nuisance to many administrative documentations, e.g. some don't allow hyphen in names so they just don't include it, or they just put in "First" for my "First-Name" etc.
10 years passed now and I am trying to correct my 401k account name to "Firstname" and there's no proper documentation that I can use to have them changed. They require marriage certificate but I got married before the name change. If that does not work, they require a court order document. But court has nothing to do with it. If that does not work, go get a "one-and-the-same" signature guarantee from banks, I called around my banks, and Chase rejected my request because of lack of formal name change request document but Vanguard does not have such thing.
My questions are:
1. Basically "First-Name" and "Firstname" sound the same and all the alphabets are there, just the difference is "-". Will there be a trouble down the road getting my money out of the account?
2. I found I was able to quickly change the name on IRA accounts by a just quick call to Vanguard. So I was even thinking about rolling over the money in 401k to IRA within the Vanguard profile. But I don't see a point of moving to pre-tax 401k amount into traditional IRA, other than the name issue. Tax implication for rolling it over to Roth IRA is daunting. Was there any benefit of doing it tax wise? The 401k money has grown quite a bit over time, it's now at 500k.