Expenses

How much are you paying for the privilege of investing? Every expense takes a bite out of your portfolio and investment expenses make a huge difference in how much money you have in retirement. Even a 1% fee can compound to over 30% of market returns over 40 years. This tool visualizes the impact of various investment expenses over time and demonstrates how compound interest affects those expenses.

Fees and expenses represent guaranteed risk-free income for investment companies and financial planners. Compound interest in this tool represents the market return you would have earned had you remained invested and not paid those fees. In other words, it shows how much future market returns are redirected to financial professionals from your portfolio.

This tool models future expenses and allows you to adjust management fees, sales loads, expense ratio and time period as inputs and calculates compound interest as output. The chart below displays the market return over time before expenses and categorizes where returns go by color. Your goal is to maximize the portfolio area. The pie chart breaks down market returns by category at the end of the time frame. Click on the details button to view the numbers behind the charts.

This tool models purchasing Class-A shares with a front-end load, or a no-load fund if you set sales load to 0%. See investment expenses for more information.