March 5, 2015

Wall Street is bleeding investors dry



Quoted from “Americans Aren’t Saving Enough for Retirement, but One Change Could Help” by Eduardo Porter in The New York Times: March 3, 2015
“Everybody’s big focus is that we have to save more,” said John C. Bogle, founder and former chief executive of Vanguard, the investment management colossus. “A greater part of the problem is the failure of investors to earn their fair share of market returns.” His observation suggests a different policy prescription: shoring up Americans’ retirement requires, first of all, aligning the interests of investment advisers and their clients. A research paper by Mr. Bogle published in Financial Analysts Journal makes the case. Actively managed mutual funds, in which many workers invest their retirement savings, are enormously costly. First, there is the expense ratio — about 1.12 percent of assets for the average large capitalization blend fund. Then there are transaction costs and distribution costs. Active funds also pay a penalty for keeping a share of their assets in low-yielding cash. Altogether, costs add up to 2.27 percent per year, Mr. Bogle estimates. By contrast, a passive index fund, like Vanguard’s Total Stock Market Index Fund, costs merely 0.06 percent a year in all. Of course, Mr. Bogle has a horse in the race. He founded the Vanguard Group. He invented the first index fund for the public. His case is powerful, nonetheless.
“Assuming an annual market return of 7 percent, he says, a 30-year-old worker who made $30,000 a year and received a 3 percent annual raise could retire at age 70 with $927,000 in the pot by saving 10 percent of her wages every year in a passive index fund. (Such a nest egg, at the standard withdrawal rate of 4 percent, would generate an inflation-adjusted $37,000 a year more or less indefinitely.) If she put it in a typical actively managed fund, she would end up with only $561,000.” Read the details at: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/04/business/americans-arent-saving-enough-for-retirement-but-one-change-could-help.html?_r=0

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