Roger;
welcome to the wide world of high finance. Your broker has been leeching off you for years. Stand up and rip the sucker off your back!
As you wake up to the benefits of Vanguard (i've been with them since I was 25 years old and am incredibly loyal like most of us here), you might also want to look at DFA. DFA has similarly low fees, but has index or index-like funds that Vanguard doesn't always have. For example, they can get you micro-cap stocks (CRSP deciles #9 and #10) that are still reasonably priced, as well as international small stocks, international small value, emerging markets value -- that sort of thing -- which will be harder or impossible at Vanguard and important to you if you start to follow the advice of William Bernstein (another favorite of some of us here). Also, Vanguard won't give you international bonds, which Bernstein and others advise you should have for diversification in your bond portfolio. DFA can get you 2yr or 5yr global bond funds at good prices.
you can check out dfa at
www.dfaus.com You will need to go through a fee-only advisor to get into them, but once you do, you can get institutional prices on these and other funds through a schwab account your advisor will set up. DFA is basically for institutions only, but they'll sell to individuals using one of their approved advisors.
My DFA guy was able to get some of the Commodity funds (Pimco and Oppenheimer -which normally have loads for individuals) no-load and very low fee at prices normally reserved for the 50-million dollar account crowd. (Commodities is also one of the asset categories the efficient frontier literature pushes as being poorly-correlated with US Stocks and Bonds, and thus attractive for diversifying your portfolio -- reducing risk and/or increasing yield)
good luck, and whatever you do, ax your broker. btw, you can easily check out fees for mutual funds at morningstar.com. What is not shown there is cost of trading shares at the funds -- either in brokerage commissions your fund pays or cost of the bid-ask spread as it trades shares inthe fund. The brokerage commissions can actually be being kicked back to your fund in part through the use of soft dollars, essentially paying fund expenses that are untracked anywhere. These numbers can whack another few percentage of yield off your assets every year, and up to now, nobody knows how to rigorously track those numbers. You can assume, however, that an index fund, a tax-advantaged fund, or a fund with a back-end load designed to discourage hot money will have lower trading costs than a high-turnover active hotmoney fund. Again, the Vanguard and DFA funds are generally well-designed to keep these trading costs low for you, including the backend load Vanguard puts on trades which is actually not a load at all but a help to all of us long term investors to keep our fees even lower.
