Retirement for Dummies Questions

[bada_bing]

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@nightglider wrote:

What drawbacks do most 401k plans have?

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Mostly investment options. 401K plans, especially those provided by small employers, are notorious for have only a few underperforming, high fee funds available as investment options. Of course, there are some plans that have adequate good options available. But no 401K plan beats an IRA account at a discount brokerage like Schwab, Fidelity, etc. for investment options because your options there are basically unlimited. I have heard HR people state, more than once, that 401K participants had requested fewer investment options because there were too many in the plan and it was confusing. LOL. That is in plans that had maybe 15 funds ovffered total and none of them were star performers.

[nightglider]

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bada_bing wrote

Mostly investment options. 401K plans, especially those provided by small employers, are notorious for have only a few underperforming, high fee funds available as investment options. Of course, there are some plans that have adequate good options available. But no 401K plan beats an IRA account at a discount brokerage like Schwab, Fidelity, etc. for investment options because your options there are basically unlimited. I have heard HR people state, more than once, that 401K participants had requested fewer investment options because there were too many in the plan and it was confusing. LOL. That is in plans that had maybe 15 funds ovffered total and none of them were star performers.

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I would wager that people who become confused with 15 investment funds would fare no better if their 401k were hosted with Schwab, Fidelity, etc. This is just as much a problem of people not understanding their investment options as it is having only poor investment options.

I will give the TSP credit here, though. They provide 5 investment funds and 4 of them are index funds (bond, large/mid-cap, small cap, international) and one is composed of a govt security issued specially to the TSP. The bond index fund's expense ratio is .039% and the rest are below .030%.

[heyitsyeh]

Depends on the company. I work for a fairly large, stable company and have gotten 3.5% rate of return so far after 6 months of employment. It does help that some of the options are indexes at no more than 0.02% expense ratios.