The Fund Industry Measured What Index Fund Investors Pay. The Average Is $5 a Year on $10,000.

The Investment Company Institute publishes a study of mutual fund fees every year. My first boss, Connie, chose her fund by its fee in 1993 and has not chosen another one since.

In 1999 I was twenty-three and worked in the front office of a moving-and-storage company in Duluth, Minnesota. Connie, who was left-handed and smudged every dispatch sheet she signed, ran the office. She had hired me, and she was forty-one that year.

That April a man from the retirement plan came to enroll the new hires. He brought a binder with fourteen funds in it, and every fund had its own page of star ratings and a chart of the last five years. I asked to take the binder home for the weekend. Connie watched me carry it past her desk and said, “I bought the cheap one. That was the whole meeting.”

The cheap one was a fund she had owned since 1993, outside the company plan. It was an S&P 500 index fund, which holds the stocks of five hundred large American companies and makes no attempt to choose among them. She had opened it by mail with a form torn out of a magazine and set it to take $150 from her checking account each month. That was the last decision she made about it.