Minimize your Investing Costs

November 17, 2009 – 2:07 pm – No Comment

The Money Tree

You can minimize how much you spend when it comes to investing by doing just a few things. Cutting how much someone spends on investing is one of the five painless ways to cut expenses in a report from Time Magazine.

One thing that you can do to minimize your investing costs is, of course, to go from a full service brokerage to one that offers cheaper trades. Then again, a lot of people aren’t comfortable with making decisions when it comes to their investments. There are some brokerages that will charge very little per trade, but they are going to let you make your decisions. The stock information that you are missing out on by picking out one of these brokers could be made up by searching the internet for investment information. You have to be a bit more hands on with your trades but you could save yourself a lot of money in the long run.

Another thing that eats at your money when it comes to investing is that you are being charged fees that are hidden in your 401 (k) or your IRA. When you have your money in these kinds of funds they are often put in mutual funds and there are recurring fees associated with them. Because these fees are deducted from the balance already in the account rather than charging you out of your bank account, they often fly under the radar.

The best way to help out your 401(k) and the fees associated with it is to stick with low-cost index funds. You can reduce your annual expense to as little as 0.2% of the balance. There are actively managed funds that can cost you up to 1.20% of your balance.

From the article:

On an account worth $100,000, your annual cost in index funds is a mere $200 instead of $1,190 with actively managed funds. So you’d save $990 a year by switching. But that’s only the start.

The money you save each year stays in the fund and grows. Let’s say a low-cost index fund and an average-cost actively managed fund both grow 8% a year for 20 years. Over that period, you’d end up with $75,678 more with the index fund by virtue of the additional compound returns from lower expenses; the index fund would grow to $449,133 while the actively managed fund would grow to $373,455. That’s more than $3,700 a year.

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