windyblow wrote: Thu Dec 05, 2024 12:41 pm
CyclingDuo wrote: Thu Dec 05, 2024 9:57 am
Good chance that the poster, if retired or moved on from previous employer, is having to pay an administrative wrap fee over and beyond the underlying ER fees of the individual funds. Employer usually covers that fee while working for them, but once one has left the organization the employee gets hit with paying those fees. Moving to a lower cost brokerage firm into an IRA would at least absolve the administrative wrap fee.
OP - do you know how much you are paying for the administrative wrap fee?
CyclingDuo
I want to leave 403B primarily it's quite confusing to me. TIAA's website doesn't help either. I just want to deal with a simple site to trade some mutual funds or ETFs.
I don't know the administrative wrap fee at TIAA. Not sure what this question is about

But not the main reason for me to want to leave TIAA as aforementioned.
Yes, I agree there are a lot of terms.
I apologize for throwing the administrative wrap fee term at you, but it is a typical fee within 403b and 457b plans where the service provider for your workplace retirement fund adds some additional fees over and beyond the underlying expense ratio fees (ER fees) charged by every mutual fund simply to manage and service your account. Call them Admin Fees, Administrative Wrap Fees, Service Fees, or what have you - they exist.
Your quarterly and annual statements should list the amount you are being charged. Each fund has an expense ratio, and the admin fee that was previously paid for by your employer is now being paid by you. Those fees should show up in the quarterly/annual statements as TIAA Service Charges/Fees or TIAA Plan Servicing Fees. You will see dividends listed on each statement, as well as the servicing fees for each quarter on your statement. Those servicing fees may be a tenth of one percent or more (or less) depending on your former employer's arrangement with TIAA and what their particular plan is charged in fees.
Perhaps not a huge deal, but I was just asking because if you got those funds into a low cost brokerage firm traditional IRA account (tIRA), then you would at least be saving that portion of your quarterly/annual service fee charges and only be paying the expense ratios of the underlying Vanguard funds/ETFs in their new location.
When you add the underlying service fee charges (admin fees) + the expense ratio fees of each underlying mutual fund (ER fee) it can equal an amount that may or may not take you out of the bottom row of this graphic...
In other words, you don't want to share too much of the pie with TIAA. You want to keep it a very small sliver of a slice such as the graphic in the lower right corner that shows the Expense Ratio of 0.04%. Moving to a low cost brokerage firm such as Fidelity, Vanguard, Schwab would allow you to be paying the expense ratio (ER fee) only of your mutual funds or ETFs and not having to pay any sort of a servicing fee/admin fee/administrative wrap fee on top of the ER fees to hold your money there.
Transferring your money to a low cost brokerage firm would mean you would repurchase your asset allocation (AA) as in bond funds/equity funds in the IRA at the low cost brokerage firm to match your needs. Whether it be the low cost ETF versions of your favorite mutual funds, or mutual funds themselves - it can all be done at lower cost than what you are currently paying at TIAA due to your servicing fees that you are being charged to hold your money there in a plan from your former employer as an ex-employee of that company.
That, in a nutshell, is what I was trying to say with the terminology used in my previous post.
CyclingDuo
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