Three days on a fee and no answer

Good morning. I promised you six tenths of one per cent and three days of looking, and I should say at the top that the three days did not produce an answer. This is the letter about not finding one.

The account is an old employer plan from before 2011, the kind that follows you around. The annual disclosure lists a fund with a total annual operating expense of 0.61 per cent. I wanted to know what that buys, and specifically how much of it is the fund managing money and how much is somebody being paid to keep records.

There is a genuine regulation here and it is better than nothing. Under 29 CFR 2550.404a-5, the Labor Department requires plan administrators to send participants an annual comparative chart of the investment options, carrying each fund's expense ratio, and to disclose quarterly the dollar amounts actually deducted from the account for administrative services.

Both of those arrived. I have them in front of me. The quarterly figure was small and specific and I have no argument with it.

Fees taken inside the fund, out of its total operating expenses, are treated differently. Those do not have to appear as a dollar amount on a statement. What the rule requires instead, where it applies, is a general statement that some of the plan's administrative expenses were paid out of those operating expenses.

That arrangement has a name, revenue sharing, and it is entirely legal and disclosed at the plan level to my old employer under a separate rule. To me it is a sentence saying it happened, attached to a percentage.

So the honest position after three days is that I know the rate and I do not know the split, and the reason I do not know the split is that nobody is obliged to tell me.

The Government Accountability Office has recommended, among other things, that quarterly disclosures give participants the actual cost of asset-based investment fees rather than a percentage, and that a consistent term be used across the industry for what those fees are called. Those are recommendations, which is another way of saying it is not the rule today.

The route people who do this professionally suggest is to pull the fund prospectus, work out which share class you are actually in, and reconcile the expense ratio against it. I started that on Tuesday and stopped on Wednesday, partly because the share class was not obvious and partly because I was becoming a person who spends a week on eighty dollars.

Freddie Mac PMMS, 27 Aug 2026. Federal Reserve, 29 Jul. BLS, 12 Aug.

I spent thirty years telling people that a number they had been handed was checkable, and this week I ran into one that is only checkable up to a point. I do not have a tidy way to end that. Whether 0.61 is high for what the account gets, I could not tell you, and I am wary of anybody who would tell you off the top of their head.

If somebody reading this has traced one of these all the way through to the dollar, I would like to know how far you got and where it stopped. That is not a rhetorical request.

Day thirteen on the telephone call to my insurer. The policy copy is nine days out.

Tomorrow: what a rebuild costs now against what it cost when the limit was written, which is the same problem as this one and has better numbers behind it.