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Comment by orbitingpluto | Hacker News Reader

It's shocking how much of that gets eaten up by investment fees when you're only investing a small amount of money.

It's also amazing how small investment fees can become.

If you're losing much of that to fees, you're investing in the wrong funds with the wrong firms. Vanguard, Fidelity, Schwab: no fee, low-expense ratio total market index funds. In my target retirement fund, I'm paying $16 per year per $10,000 invested, and that's not the lowest ER fund you can find.

Many employees find themselves forced to select between a narrow selection of mutual funds from their employee provided RSP.

Unless they forego their employee contribution to the RSP, they have very little flexibility.

Low quality fund options in employer provided retirement account are a problem, but in the U.S. you can roll it over into a self-controlled IRA at whatever provider you like once you change employers, so for most people the number of years it'd be subject to those higher fee funds is not too high, at least.

I completely agree with everything you said.

But not everyone can do a triple flip with a half twist while navigating the financial system.

i.e. I think I reworded my original comment in reverse.

It's not very complicated at all, the issue is more a lack of education. Online personal finance resources and communities help a lot, but people still have to know to seek out that information.

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