If you own an index fund and you’re paying an expense ratio greater than 0.35%, you’re getting ripped off. I created a list of index funds from major brokers, like Vanguard, Fidelity, and Schwab, looked up their expense ratios on Google Finance, and then listed them in the order from cheapest to most expensive.

None of the funds on the list have a sales load of any kind and I was surprised to find a fund as cheap as 0.09%. I was even more surprised to find index funds that charged over 1%. Check out State Farm S&P 500 Index B – it has a 1.49% expense ratio and a 5% deferred load! (a deferred load is a fee that is charged when you sell an asset) It has $425M in total assets too and each one of their customers is getting ripped off.

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My wife’s Roth IRA currently sits at a TD Ameritrade account, where it’s been sitting for the last three or four years. With the majority of it in cash, mostly because we lost track of the account, we want to invest it in our retirement investment of choice, an index fund. Our index fund of choice happens to be the Vanguard 500 Index Fund because most of our retirement funds are with Vanguard. Vanguard does not have the cheapest index fund, I believe that title now resides with Fidelity’s Spartan 500 index. Paying the extra 0.08% seems reasonable considering we can manage it all in one place.

The only downside about this entire process is that TD Ameritrade has a $75 outbound full account transfer fee. Fortunately Vanguard does not charge you to transfer in an IRA (to my knowledge, no one does).

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Another year, another Smart Money broker survey! We’ve been reviewing SmartMoney’s best broker series for several years now (here’s 2008) and it’s always valuable to see how the different brokers fare from year to year. In the 2009 broker survey, we didn’t see too much change compared to 2008.

Unlike last year, which featured a merging of the discount and full service broker lists (in which TradeKing lost a #1 ranking they enjoyed for several years), they didn’t make any big changes to the way they analyzed the brokers. (here’s the list if you want to take a peek)

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One of the most frequent questions I get is “Where should I open an IRA?”

Short answer: Anywhere, just open one! If you want mutual funds, open an account with the company that offers the funds you want, like Vanguard, Fidelity, etc; because they will let you buy and sell the funds for free. If you want stocks, open an account with a company that offers the lowest fees.

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In the latest issue of Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, they rated a dozen discount brokers on a variety of factors including commission, research & tools, fees, investment options, “easy of use,” and customer service. The results were pretty close to the results of Smart Money’s 2008 ranking of the best discount brokers.

Kiplinger’s Best Discount Brokers

1. Fidelity
2. Charles Schwab
3. Muriel Siebert
4. TradeKing
5. E*Trade
6. OptionsHouse
7. TD Ameritrade
8. WellsTrade
9. Firstrade
10. OptionsXpress
11. Zecco
12. Scottrade

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There isn’t a single reason why you shouldn’t like index funds. They’re cheap, they offer market rates of return without fail, and they are simple to buy. They beat actively managed mutual funds a majority of the time and they are often advocated as the best investment the average Joe can put their money in. So why not put all your money into an S&P 500 Index fund like the Fidelity Spartan 500 Index or the Vanguard 500 Index, call it a day and enjoy more time with the family? Because that would be a huge mistake.

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Smart Money reviews brokers every single year and they recently just gave a preview to their results. Rather than give the straight ranking, they discussed some headline categories (Commissions & Fees, Research, Trading Tools) and then listed the best and worst from each category.

For best commissions and fees, they listed Interactive Brokers, a brokerage firm I hadn’t heard of but does charge pretty rock bottom fees (half a cent per share on equity trades). They also showed the spread was anywhere from $4.95 for TradeKing to $112.50 for Fidelity on broker-executed trades.

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Money Magazine recently released the only 7 investments you’ll ever need and, surprise surprise, my favorite firm, Vanguard, was listed first choice for five of the seven. Their founder, John Bogle, was a major proponent of index funds and it shows in their offering, as almost all of Money’s choices were low-expense ratio index funds.

Need another reason to have a mutual fund account at Vanguard? (No, Vanguard doesn’t sponsor this site!)

Blue-chip US-stock fund: Fidelity Spartan 500 Index (FSMKX) because it replicates the S&P 500 with an expense ratio of 0.10% (coincidentally, Vanguard’s version, the Vanguard 500 Index Fund Investor Shares (VFINX) is 50% more expensive with a ratio of 0.15%).

Blue-chip foreign-stock fund: Vanguard Total International Stock Index (VGTSX) because of its solid performance, beating 90% of its peers, and because it’s an index fund with an expense ratio of 0.27%. Another Vanguard fund, the Vanguard FTSE All World Ex-U.S. ETF (VEU), was listed as an alternative.

Small-company fund: T. Rowe Price New Horizons (PRNHX) is an actively managed fund, one of the few actively managed funds they selected, and is “one of the most efficient of the actively managed crowd.” Considering it is actively managed, an expense ratio of 0.8% is pretty good, about half the average.

Value fund: Oh look, another Vanguard fund – the Vanguard Value Index (VIVAX) and its 0.2% expense ratio and a record that trumps 78% of its peers. Value funds go after investments that appear overlooked or beaten down and try earn a little off those cigar butts and dividends, rather than looking for growth potential.

High-quality bond fund: Vanguard Total Bond Market Index (VBMFX) snags this category with a 0.2% expense ratio. Bonds are good to be the rock in your portfolio to give you some grounding as your other investments shoot up and crash down.

Inflation-protected bond fund: This last category was won by Vanguard’s Inflation-Protected Securities Fund (VIPSX) and it’s 0.2% expense ratio (Vanguard’s index funds are ridiculously efficient). “Among TIPS funds, Vanguard Inflation-Protected Securities has several things going for it, including lower costs and better management than you would get if you assembled your own TIPS portfolio. While the fund returned 6.6% over the past five years, you shouldn’t expect it to make a pile of dough. Its job is to protect the money you already have.”

Earlier this year I discussed how I was going to follow Flexo’s lead and open up a Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund. The idea behind the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund is that you can make a charitable donation now, have the assets appreciate, and then decide where donations will go later on. Much like how a mutual fund is actually an organization, the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund is an organization. When you donate money, you are donating to the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund and you have two options as to where the money goes. You can either open up a Giving Account under your name (or any name you wish) or open up a Pooled Income Fund.

Giving Account

This is the type of account Flexo talked about and one that I was seriously considering. What you do is open a Giving Account, contribute funds, direct how the funds are to be invested, and then recommend grants. You will notice that all the documents say that you will “recommend” which organizations will be the beneficiary of your funds, but they aren’t legally bound to honor your wishes. I think that specific language is used for legal purposes but they honor most recommendations.

Pooled Income Fund

This is the second option and one I hadn’t considered. It’s part charitable fund and half income generation, akin to an annuity, though the final payout goes to a charitable organization (up to 10). So let’s say you contribute $10,000. You direct where the contributions will be invested and you can select up to two beneficiaries. Each quarter, the proceeds from your investments will be paid out to the beneficiaries. Upon the death of the final beneficiary, the value of the account goes towards charities. It’s different than the Giving Account and less desirable for what I’d like to accomplish.

Considerations

So, it sounds pretty easy right? Why wouldn’t everyone do this? (these concerns cover only the Giving Account)

• Initial limits and fees: The initial contribution has to be greater than $5,000 and each additional contribute has to be greater than $1,000. The fees include the expenses of the investments plus an Annual Administrative Fee. The administrative fee is the greater of 0.60% of the total fund value or $100 for the first half million, 0.3% for the second half million, 0.2% for the next million and a half, and 0.15% for the rest up to five million. Beyond that and the fees are different. If you were to contribute $5,000, you’d be talking an administrative fee of 2% plus the underlying investment fees. If you don’t have $5,000 or you don’t want to pay any of these fees, you might want to just donate directly to a charity.
• Time horizon: Since you do select investments for your contributions, there is the potential that your investments will lose value. So, if you plan on doing this, contribute funds you think you might want to use next year or the year after (or, ideally, in five years). Increasing the time horizon will smooth out the random walk of the stock market.
• Tax benefit: As much fun as it would be to have the Jim Charitable Trust, the tax benefits are better if you contribute appreciated stock. When you donate appreciated stock that you’ve held for over a year, you can deduct the entire value of the stock from your income, including the appreciation. (For more on that, read this article about reducing your capital gains by donating stock) With the Giving Account, you deduct your initial contribution and not the amount actually granted, so you never actually benefit from the appreciation (but you can donate appreciated stock).
• Grant exclusions: Almost any recommendation you give will be accepted with the exception of several groups, though there are very good reasons. For example, you cannot recommend any donation that would result in you receiving any sort of gift or preferential treatment. The list is available here.

I’ll be honest, the idea of opening a small charitable gift fund in our name does sound like fun and it would be great to be able to leverage the market to help further our philanthropic goals but with a $5,000 start price and those annual fees, I may wait a little while before opening one up. The uncertainty of the market (and a short time horizon) are also serious considerations as well… what do you all think? Good idea? Bad idea? Wait? Go now?

Need to absolutely reach your brokerage right now? Here’s a handy resources of all the brokerages I am aware of, their phone numbers, hours of operation, and a link to the brokerage’s contact page. On that page you’ll usually find a Fax number, overnight mail address, regular mail address, email addresses, and sometimes even an online chat. In many cases, there are multiple telephone numbers listed, I chose the one for existing brokerage clients (if that’s not what you need, just hit up the link and you’ll find the whole list).

Did I miss your brokerage? Let me know and I’ll add their phone number.