How to Ruin Your Portfolio Performance: The Power of Fees and Time

By Anna B. Wroblewska

For most people, investing isn’t all that easy. Between asset allocations, risk profiles, and the simple matter of funding your investment accounts, there are numerous decisions to make and a lot of conflicting information about how to make them.

One piece of advice, however, is notable for its simplicity and its staying power: pay attention to fees. The more you pay, the worse your performance will be.

Don’t believe it? Just take a look at the math.

The long-term effect of fees

In our minds, the difference between a 0.5% fee and 1.5% might feel so small as to be almost insignificant -- but the long-run effect of that tiny difference is enormous.

Let’s say you’re investing $500 per month into a retirement account. You do this every month for 30 years, and your account enjoys an average annual growth rate of 8% per year. Assuming you don’t make any withdrawals or interrupt your savings, you’ll have accumulated $750,000 in savings after all that time.

Now, enter fees. Here is how those savings look at different fee levels:

It’s already a bit of a shock to go from no fees to 0.5%, but consider this: the difference between 0.5% in fees and 1.5% in fees amounts to $122,000 in lost savings over the course of your lifetime. That’s about 16% of your “no fees” account balance.

The research literature backs this up. Economist William Sharpe estimates that index fund investors will have about 20% more money to spend in retirement. In other words, people who spend less on fees tend to have more money to retire with.

What about performance?

The first question that you might ask when presented with this kind of information is simple: “What about performance?”

After all, if higher fees are delivering higher returns, then surely they’re worthwhile? This is especially of interest for investors thinking about actively managed mutual funds.

While the sentiment makes sense in theory, it’s not such a simple matter in practice. Finding mutual fund investments that can consistently beat the market is far from easy. By one estimate, the Vanguard Total Stock Market index beat active managers 77% of the time. Another study from Vanguard demonstrated that even outperforming active managers have a difficult time keeping uptheir performance. The researchers found that even good active managers often have periods of underperformance, which makes selecting one that’s worth the extra cost all the more difficult.

This is especially complicated when you consider the level of performance required to make upfor extra fees over time. In the example above, where we assume a “baseline” performance of 8%, the manager charging a 1.5% percent fee would have to provide an average of 9% returns over the long run in order to make upfor the extra cost of the fund. Again, whether that is possible or not in any given case is pretty much impossible to predict -- and even if you get it right in the short run, outperformance is difficult to keepupwith any amount of consistency.

When does paying more make sense?

There is a major caveat to the wisdom of paying less. For some investors, staying invested in a single strategy is incredibly hard -- especially where emotions and dreams about retirement are involved. These are the kinds of situations that can cause panicked selling or elated buying, both of which involve extra trading and its common counterpart: buying into overheated markets and selling into downturns.

Just like high management fees, trading fees can be a powerful performance killer. Even if you only pay $5 per trade, the cost of trading repeatedly adds upquickly over time. Why? Not only do you pay the price of the trade, you pay the performance cost of moving in and out of investments. Unfortunately, for most investors those moves usually happen at the wrong time.

In these situations, paying a little extra for professional helpcan be worth it.

A good advisor can helpyou to stay the course when the going gets tough: and when it comes to investing, the going will almost certainly get tough at some point. While you might still want to be on the lookout for high-cost products, an advisor can helpsoothe your mind and keepyour investment strategy on track.

The kinds of fees you pay and the amount will depend on your arrangement with your advisor: some advisors charge commissions, others work on a fee-only basis, and still others might offer a consultation fee for their time. There is no one arrangement that works best in all situations, but you want to ensure that you want to understand the specifics of what you’re paying for and what it amounts to on an annual basis. This will at least give you a starting point to make an apples-to-apples comparison of fee arrangements and advisors.

While it does come with a cost, the stability of an advisor can helpprovide peace of mind, which in turn can helpyou reapthe benefits of long-term reinvestment -- without incurring the additional costs of trading or, still worse, trading too much at absolutely the worst time.

Differentiating between fees that helpand those that hinder

At the end of the day, it’s important to differentiate between fees that are helping you and those that could hurt you.

Active management is a good idea in theory, but it often falls short in practice. If you can stand by your strategy and avoid emotional investing, then going out on your own with low-cost investments is a great way to go.

But if you can’t or are worried about it, consider consulting with an advisor. A good one will be worth the extra cost by helping you to make a plan -- and helping you to stick with it. Just be sure to understand how much you’re paying and what you’re paying for. This way, you can compare the services you’re being offered and the advisors offering them. After all, while it’s important to know the value of an advisor, that value is best understood when analyzed relative to the cost.