Understanding IRA Fees: Protecting Your Retirement Savings

Many investors fail to realize the impact that IRA fees have on their portfolios. As an investor, you want to pay special attention to fees to prevent them from taking up too much of your retirement funds. Here are a few things to consider about IRA fees and how they can affect your retirement portfolio.

IRA Fees

An individual retirement account is held with a custodian that manages the account for you. Even if you make all the investment decisions yourself, the company that holds your money still has to charge something in order to hold the account for you. As an investor, you do not want to pay any more feeds than you have to. Therefore, you need to find out exactly what you are being charged by your IRA provider.

Many times, IRA holders will be charged a maintenance fee or management fee by the company that holds the account. This fee typically runs anywhere from $20 to $50 per year and is a fairly standard fee. Therefore, you may not be able to get around this, regardless of who you work with.

Other IRA providers will have a management fee that is based on the value of your account. It will typically be a percentage of the total dollar value of the account. It could go as high as 5%, but is often 1 or 2% of the account. It can be to your advantage to find a provider that waives the management fee once your account gets up to a certain point. There are many accounts out there that have this feature, and it can save you a substantial amount of money.