Employee stock purchase question

[StephMK]

DH worked for a company for several years but left a few years ago. While there, he had participated in the ESOP program. A few months after he left, they sent him a common stock certificate showing his shares. At the time, the stock was completely worthless & I filed the certificate away.

Now I'm going through papers & came across it. I looked them up to see if they had closed yet & they are doing surprisingly slighly better - not great at all but $7 higher than than the .50 they were at when he left. BUT they now trade under a different set of letters, same company name, address, etc.

So is this certificate something we could sell to get the money? I am not skilled in this area & have no idea how this works or if the certificate is valid in those terms. Also, is it invalid if they now trade under a different nasdaq abbreviation? Everything else is the same.

 

[crisi]

Probably - depends on how the reorg happened, but probably. Take it to a broker.

 

[MickeyDisneyFan]

If you have a brokerage account you can mail it in to them and they usually charge a fee to do the research then will give you the shares in your account.

If you dont have an account I would check the online brokers and see who has the cheapest "re-org fee"

 

[Disney_Stock]

Sometimes the looking up the cusip number on line can help. Another thought is to contact investor relations and if that doesnt work, contact scripophily.com because they work with old certificates.

 

[deedeetoo]

When my MIL died, we found a bunch of old stock certificates in her house for a company that no longer exists. We did a little research, found out they had been bought by another company. We called the investor relations number at that company (which we found on their website). They were great. We mailed in the shares, and they sent us a check. We didn't need to pay a fee or go through a broker. I'm not sure if this would work for a company that is still publically traded though.

 

[tinkmom2]

When I left Starbucks I had a certain number of days to cash in my stock or it became worthless. I would check with a company like Fidelity and see if they can help you.

 

[StephMK]

Surprised to see this thread dug back up but I'll update in case anyone else has a similar situation.

I did some digging & made some calls. Basically, we are out of luck & I am rather annoyed. When the company "restructured", the shares are not good unless the new nasdaq trading initials get above a certain percentage. THEN the old certificates can be sold, etc. Until then, we get nothing & they get to start over.

 

[SandrA9810]

Well hang on to it a little longer and maybe they'll go up.

And for some reason, it's always the new people that seem to dig up threads from long ago. Just something I've noticed the last few times.