What is the most effective strategy you have to increase your long-term mutual fund and ETF investment returns?
Just reduce your investment fees to rock bottom and buy directly to eliminate all sales loads. This strategy is both simple and entirely within your control. You do not have to be smarter than all those other smart investors out there.
You do not have to take on the Herculean and very time consuming task of trying to “beat the market.” With this smart, low cost investment strategy, you only have to be a better bargain shopper, when you buy your investments.
Over a 30-year retirement investment accumulation period, a $10,000 investment — reduced by a 5.75% initial sales load charge to pay a financial advisor — could grow to $40,734. This result assumes that your investment earns a 5% annual real dollar return after inflation and investment costs, and it ignores any capital gains taxes.
In contrast, if you instead buy no load mutual funds directly, you can cut out the initial sales load charge entirely and put your full investment capital to work for you from the outset. In addition, if you also pay annual investment fees that are one percentage point lower, you could end up with $16,701 more! This means that your $10,000 initial investment would be worth 41% MORE after 30 years, when compared to the $40,734 retirement portfolio that you would get using higher cost mutual funds with sales loads!
The Skilled Investor has published numerous articles on the importance of investment cost control to investors. To learn more, click this link to find the following article and use the links at the bottom to find more investment cost articles: “Excessive investment costs are a huge problem for individual investors.”
Financial industry advisor sales people and investment counselors will imply that they can find “better” mutual funds and ETFs for you. Really??
To avoid exposing themselves to some very significant legal liabilities, most investment counselors will not tell you directly that you will get “better returns,” if you pay sales loads and higher fees. However, most advisors know that they can still make the sale and do not have to make such a direct and likely false statement. Instead, they will just selectively sell to you only those supposedly “good, seasoned” funds that have historically done better than average.
Financial advisors don’t have to predict that [...]