My Comments: We live where the economic model is capitalism. There is no fundamental economic incentive beyond making money for those who provide goods and services to the general public. From time to time, society has found it appropriate to create transparency or to regulate a level of transparency that effectively mitigates against financial abuse.
An example that comes to mind is where there is a mandated fiduciary component. This standard applies to CPA, to attorneys, and to others including Registered Investment Advisor Representatives. Those last are the folks who typically charge fees for managing your money. If your financial advisor is not a fiduciary, then it’s buyer beware time.
You may know that mutual funds are required to disclose their fees. What you may not know is that there are significant exceptions to those rules, and it’s not atypical for the non-disclosed fees to exceed the disclosed ones.
As more and more of us are transitioning to retirement, there is widening exposure to the threat posed by fees and their effect on your ability to pay your bills if you live long enough. Unless you plan to be dead soon after retirement, you should be paying attention to the fees you are charged on the money you’ve set aside to pay your bills as you grow older.
by John Scott, November 16, 2018
Although people would like more money for their retirement, few pay much attention to the fees charged to their retirement accounts. But these fees, even when they appear small, can affect—in a big and negative way—a person’s ability to retire.
To help illustrate the potential impact of fees over time, The Pew Charitable Trusts has developed a new investment fee calculator—allowing users to see how much they risk losing because of fees. The calculator guides people through scenarios that show how fees affect building retirement savings as well as how long a nest egg will last in retirement.
Fees limit savings directly by reducing the amount saved, and indirectly by lowering the amount available for compounding. Often structured as a percentage of assets invested, fees are most commonly incurred in two ways: either as a mutual or index fund fee captured in the fund’s expense ratio or as a management fee charged by an investment adviser. Both types of fees are generally charged on an annual basis, but actual practices vary widely.
According to the Investment Company Institute, a trade group, the median equity mutual fund expense ratio in 2017 was 1.18 percent of assets. Most fees fall between 0.66 percent (66 basis points) at the 10th percentile to 2 percent (200 basis points) at the 90th percentile. While the reasonableness of a fee is subjective, lower fees generally result in higher returns over the long term.
Take, for example, a saver investing $200 a month for 40 years. If that money was invested in a fund earning 6 percent with a fund expense ratio of 0.5 percent and an adviser fee of an additional 1 percent—for a total annual charge of 1.5 percent (150 basis points)—the worker would have about $268,700 at the end of 40 years. But consider that same $200 invested monthly in a fund and costing just 0.5 percent (50 basis points) in fees. If this investment saw the same 6 percent return, it would be worth $349,600 after 40 years— $80,900, or 30 percent, more. The higher-cost fund would have to earn 17 percent more annually than the lower-cost fund to be equally profitable, a return that research shows is very difficult to achieve.
Fees are just as relevant when savers want to preserve accumulated assets in retirement. According to Vanguard, a fund manager, the average account balance for people 65 and older is about $200,000. If a retiree expects to withdraw $1,000 a month, a bond fund charging 0.1 percent (10 basis points) with a modest 2 percent return would last 20 years. A fund charging 1 percent (100 basis points) with the same return would last only about 18 years while costing the retiree nearly $24,000 in fees. And because the retiree would also forgo the benefit of compounding the investment returns, the investment with the higher fee would have to earn around 45 percent more annually to make up the gap.
While it may seem obvious that paying less in fees results in greater savings, the small percentage difference between fees can make it hard for many investors to fully understand the impact over the long term. To make matters worse, many people saving for retirement are not aware of plan fees.
Earlier research by Pew found that nearly a third—31 percent—of people saving for retirement say they are not at all familiar with the fees charged to their accounts. About two-thirds acknowledged that they had not read any investment fee disclosures. And most small-business owners and managers at companies that provide retirement benefits don’t have a good understanding of how much they or their employees pay in fees to their plans.
People need to be aware of fees and their effects, and we at Pew are hopeful that our new calculator will help raise that awareness. After all, we all could use more money in our retirement accounts.
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