Professionally managed 401K?

I trust the funds have their own expense, perhaps 1%?

The extra fee isn't likely to enhance your return beyond the expense of the fee. Does your company match any of your deposits? What are the fees of these funds? Are some lower than others? For my 401(k), the S&P index is crazy low, .05%. The foreign funds, not so good. So in my allocation, the S&P goes into the 401(k) and other sectors go into the IRA accounts.

Joe

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wrote

What other fund in particular would you like? Fifteen to 20 funds with the basic areas covered sounds plenty fine. If there is some other fund you really want, is it possible to invest in it via a Traditional or Roth IRA, or even taxable account?

1.35% is steep and reduces your returns meaningful over ten years. I would experiment with all the free online asset allocators linked at . Note the differences. Ask yourself, "Is this really such an exact science?" If after reading more you think not, then do your own asset allocation and rebalancing, once a year.

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There is a lot of information that is needed before any useful input can be given. Early thoughts:

1. That's a pretty high fee for what really isn't much work beyond the initial asset plan. Most plans make rebalancing easy, and with slicing of contributions rebalancing isn't even necessary much of the time. With a taxable account, a manager can stay on top of tax-loss harvesting, but that's not applicable here. What is this person going to do to earn that kind of fee?
2. What kind of plan is the manager going to come up with? An index-based approach emphasizing low fees, or trying to identify hot fund managers? This talk of "expertise" sounds somewhat ominous. What allocation plan do you have now, and how did you come up with it?
3. How bad are your current selections, and how great are the additional funds? Some fund names/tickers or information would be useful.
4. Do you have significant investments outside of the 401(k)? Portfolios should normally be considered as a whole. Part of portfolio management is getting the right assets in tax-advantaged versus taxable accounts. Will this manager take that into account when creating the allocation?

Brian

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The vast majority of professional stock/fund pickers do worse than the market over the long term, and paying them an extra 1.35% is an extra insult. In my opinion, find one broad index fund if you have one, such as that covers the S&P500 or wilshire 5000, and put all your stock allocation in it, and be happy. Put whatever portion you want in bonds, in a broad bond index if possible. How old are you? If young, most if not all should be in stocks.

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Is that 1.35% on TOP of the mutual fund management fees for the funds they'd use for your portfolio?

That's pretty expensive. Maybe cheap for a very small managed account, but overall very expensive.

What funds (and at what expenses) do you have available to you if you don't go with these guys?

There are lots of free allocation tools on the web.

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