Not Fade Away

The Rolling Stones (among others) sang, "Love is love and not fade away". Mmmm, my kind of music. Just thought I'd throw that out there. Now on to my post.

I wrote a few weeks ago about my surprise at discovering how high the expenses were in my company's 401k plan since we switched providers this year. To my chagrin, I found that our plan didn't offer an index fund, which I had hoped would deliver me from the high fees that were causing my hopes of early retirement to "fade away". I had spoken with the company's owner about it before to no avail. Spoke with him again after writing that post, because I was pretty charged up about it at the time, and gave him a little paper I had written up about how I thought it would be good for all of us if we could get an index fund. I think I was becoming a nuisance. He's busy running the company. But today he came up to me out of the blue and told me that as of next January, we'll have an S&P 500 index fund available! Not only that, but since our company's total combined account balance had passed some certain threshold, the expenses on all of our funds will be dropping by (generally) 1/2 percentage point! Who ever thought math could be so fun?

Breathe in, breathe out.

I had already taken other steps to lower my expenses, like redirecting some of my contributions from my 401k, where the expenses are high (did I already mention that?) to a Roth IRA, where the expenses are l-o-w, and they offer index funds. But now with expenses going down in my 401k too, and also a lottery ticket now and then, hopes of early retirement not fade away!