I'm now curious about whether some of the more educated and sophisticated diy posters are talking about getting screwed by firms churning accounts and/or putting people into proprietary (expensive) funds. It seems overly obvious, making me think I might be missing something, that if you're putting all or most of the money in a fund, an indexed fund at the lowest cost is the way to go. I think EJ or ML or whoever else is out there would probably be taking advantage of you.
But if you've got a bunch of long term muni bonds that aren't being wildly traded, and some dividend paying stocks that don't get bought or sold unless you say so, and if EJ or ML or whoever waives any annual fees, how do they do screw us? The kind of young EJ guy that handles our office 401k and our stuff for now told me that if I really want to actively trade, I should get an E-trade account because it would be silly to pay EJ the higher commissions they charge. I liked that advice.
Maybe it depends on the person at the EJ or ML or whatever branch you're dealing with. While the young guy we're dealing with for now has taken a couple of half hearted runs at selling us something we don't want, he hasn't been pushy.
Maybe when I'm fully out of the work place, I need to seriously re-evaluate. But at the risk of being called a knucklehead or worse, I haven't seen any major screwing from this particular EJ guy in the 4 or 5 years we've had accounts there. What am I missing?