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I’ve been trying to wrap up this onslaught of mutual fund posts for a week now and every time I try and get away, they keep pulling me back in.

The truth is there is so much to write about on the topic, that I keep coming up with new ideas for posts.

In an article I wrote about mutual fund hidden fees last week, I mentioned three tools that I find to be very useful. After that post, I decided to review, in depth, 2 of the 3 tools mentioned: the Kiplinger Fund Finder and PersonalFund’s Mutual Fund Cost Calculator.

I left out the FINRA Mutual Fund Expense Analyzer because I felt like it’s a watered down, less accurate version of the PersonalFund calculator. And I only wanted to examine, what I thought was, the best of breed.

Continue Reading “The difference between good and great”

What I’m going to illustrate here is what it would have cost you to own a specific mutual fund last year, using the mutual fund cost calculator.

I’ve created an image (below) that you can click to enlarge. Within the image, I’ve highlighted 14 different areas that I will expand upon throughout this post.

I randomly selected a mutual fund that showed up on the results pages of the Kiplinger fund finder post from a few days ago. The name of the fund is the American Beacon Large Cap Growth Fund (ALFIX), a no load mutual fund.

Just answer a few simple questions

I then went to PersonalFund.com (btw, you have to create an account there using a valid email and password, which takes less than a minute to do) and inputed the name of the fund and a few other facts:

Continue Reading “The best mutual fund cost calculator - in action!”

I first came across the Personalfund.com mutual fund fee calculator in 2001. And what a time to come across such a powerful tool. Back then many equity mutual funds were coming off a decade of unprecedented returns.

Equity mutual funds were fat with fees and weighed down by embedded capital gains; finding an efficient fund was no simple task. For that reason, having the mutual fund fee calculator, to illuminate the way, was a Godsent. (btw, I like to call that time in the market’s history the Java the Hutt period, symbolizing the gorged nature of many a stock or fund.)

Most people, back then, were giddy with their overall investment performance and could care less about the internal costs associated with mutual fund ownership. That slowly began to change, as the market took a turn for the worse in the early 2000’s.

Continue Reading “My favorite mutual fund fee calculator”