How to Find Your Investment Fees in your 401k/403b

Below is a breakdown of where to find the details of fees and benefits included in your current 401k/403b plan. 

We’ve also summarized what rolling over your plan to Ellevest means -- we outlined information about your monthly fee, benefits included, and fund fees. 

Here’s what to know:

1. Understanding your current plan

Most (if not all) of the information you need should be available to you online on your provider’s website. Here’s what to look for:

Retirement plan fees

Retirement accounts like a 401k or 403b, may have a separate fee that’s charged by the account administrator. This is a fee for maintaining and administering your account, but for employer-sponsored retirement accounts.

This might be charged as a flat fee or a percentage of assets under management. Either way, you’ll find it in the transaction history on your statement, which should come at least quarterly. 

If you can’t find a line item that looks like a fee, your employer probably covers it — that’s relatively common. Your HR department or plan administrator should be able to tell you for sure.

Fund fees (Expense Ratios)

Common investments like mutual funds and ETFs come with fund management fees. These are better known as expense ratios, are found in all such investments, no matter whether the investment is offered in a 401k or 403b plan, and they’re different from retirement plan fees.

An expense ratio gets assessed for each individual ETF or mutual fund that you are invested in, and the fee goes to the company that manages that individual fund (like Vanguard). An expense ratio can vary depending on which company is charging it. Often, the bigger the company, the lower the fees, because they have overhead efficiencies. It can also vary due to a company’s strategy; for instance, setting up a fund to replicate the S&P 500 Index is a lot easier than having it track emerging market bonds, and so that first expense ratio will be lower.

A fund’s expense ratio is expressed as an annual percentage of the assets you have invested in that fund. It reduces what you would have earned as returns on that investment. For example, if the expense ratio is 0.25% and the fund earned a 10% return, your net return would be about 9.75%. 

How do I find the expense ratios for all of the funds in my investment portfolios?

You can find many funds’ expense ratios on Morningstar’s website by typing the fund’s name into the search bar. The fund’s “Quote” tab (which should automatically be showing when you land on the fund’s page) will show “Expenses.”

If you can’t find one of your funds that way, you’ll need to log in to your investment account and find the fund’s detail page. The exact online location of this page will vary by firm, but the expense ratio is sure to be there.

2. Understanding Ellevest Rollovers

With Ellevest, there is no separate fee to rollover your 401k / 403b, that service  is included in your monthly fee. Also, we don’t charge a separate advisory fee on your assets. Fees for your advisory services, execution, custody are included, as described. 

Retirement Plan fee with Ellevest

There are no “Retirement plan fees” at Ellevest. There may be other small costs associated with your Ellevest account. To read about these in more detail, please see this FAQ page.

Fund fees (Expense Ratios) with Ellevest

With your Ellevest core (non-Impact) investment portfolios, may have fund fees that can range from 0.05% to 0.10% per year, and for Ellevest Impact Portfolios, these fund fees can range from 0.13% to 0.19% per year.

*This range includes blended expense ratios for clients’ overall portfolios, not individual fund expense ratios.