Management Fees Kill

If you don’t believe that high management fees represent a massive transfer of wealth from the public to the investment bankers who charge the fees then consider the following: You leave college at the age of 21 with a hard-earned engineering degree and your head full of Maxwell’s equations, the Church-Turing thesis and Graham’s Law of Diffusion. Your starting salary is $75,000 per year, grows with inflation, and you dutifully save 5% each year until you retire at the age of 65. By the age of 78 you will have $1,500,000 if you invest in mutual funds which return 7% (a conservative, long-term equity return) and charge you a fee of 2%.

If, instead, you bought a low-cost index fund which returned an identical 7% but only levied an annual fee of 0.2%, you would have $3,000,000 at the age of 78. And your mutual fund manager’s trust fund kid wouldn’t be driving past you in a Ferrari.