IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/crr/issbrf/ib2009-9-3.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Structure of 401(k) Fees

Author

Listed:
  • Richard W. Kopcke
  • Francis Vitagliano
  • Dan Muldoon

Abstract

Increasingly, people are depending on 401(k) and similar defined contribution plans sponsored by their employers for their retirement income. As a result, participants in these plans also are paying more of their plans’ costs, ranging from administration and sales expenses to the cost of managing investments. These costs can take a substantial toll on retirement savings. Over a 30-year career, for example, paying an annual fee of 50 basis points can reduce the purchasing power of savings at the time of retirement by one-eighth. Employers who sponsor 401(k) plans have a fiduciary responsibility to ensure their plans’ fees are reasonable and communicated to participants. Recently, the Government Accountability Office reported that participants need more information and sponsors need to disclose this information more effectively to fulfill this responsibility. The Department of Labor is revising regulations to require sponsors to report the fees of their plans more clearly to their employees. Congress also has been holding hearings, inquiring if greater disclosure would help reduce costs within 401(k) plans...

Suggested Citation

  • Richard W. Kopcke & Francis Vitagliano & Dan Muldoon, 2009. "The Structure of 401(k) Fees," Issues in Brief ib2009-9-3, Center for Retirement Research, revised Feb 2009.
    • Handle: RePEc:crr:issbrf:ib2009-9-3
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://crr.bc.edu/briefs/the-structure-of-401k-fees/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Richard W. Kopcke & Francis M. Vitagliano & Zhenya S. Karamcheva, 2009. "Fees and Trading Costs of Equity Mutual Funds in 401(k) Plans and Potential Savings from ETFS and Commingled Trusts," Working Papers, Center for Retirement Research at Boston College wp2009-27, Center for Retirement Research, revised Nov 2009.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:crr:issbrf:ib2009-9-3. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Amy Grzybowski or Christopher F Baum (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/crrbcus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.