I started at a new job recently and one of the benefits is partial matching of contributions to my retirement account. Problem is, the plan administrator offers a wide selection of more than 80 funds and I had to decide which fund(s) to buy in a day or two. It is going to take me a while to research 80 funds and the fund literature is close to useless because there is no mention of expenses. I did find a few index funds among the offerings but they turned out to be of the expensive variety (Why would I pay nearly 1% in expenses for an index fund?).

So, I took the easy route and searched for money market funds. I found two and one of them did not list its expense ratio even on the fund website! The other has a MER of 0.55%, which is not great, but it is the best of the lot. I am now contributing to the money market fund and when I find some decent funds, I plan to redeploy the retirement funds.

moneysense.ca, 18/05/05

3 Responses to “Retirement Account Decisions”

  1. Big Cajun Man says:
    May 19, 2005 at 9:26 am

    Arbee,

    OK, I’ll ask the dumb question about what MER% means? I think it means Management Expense R-word, which would translate to how much overhead to run this fund (i.e. money lost to investor year over year), is this correct?

    c8j

  2. Anonymous says:
    May 19, 2005 at 9:30 am

    why don’t you transfer it to another self directed account once a quarter?

  3. Canadian Capitalist says:
    May 19, 2005 at 7:14 pm

    Big Cajun: You nailed it. MER is management expense ratio. Total costs for operating a fund as a % of total assets. It doesn’t include any front or back-end sales charges.

    Anon: One of the conditions of the employer matching is no withdrawals / transfers prior to termination.

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