As your retirement assets grow, you’ll start getting better treatment from the brokerage houses in the form of reduced fees and it’s something you should take advantage of. The reason for this is because they 1) want to keep your business; 2) the amount of work they do, which they charge in their fees, won’t proportionally increase with each dollar you put in, so they pass on those savings to you.
Fund investors with $25,000 or $50,000 invested may pay reduced commissions on broker-sold “A” shares. Favor no-load funds? If you have $100,000 in a Vanguard Group fund — or $50,000 and you’ve been invested 10 years — you can qualify for the firm’s lower-expense share class. Similarly, Fidelity Investments offers lower-cost shares to index-fund investors with a $100,000 fund balance.
So, the lesson of the day is that if you have numerous accounts across multiple different brokerages, consider consolidating them into fewer accounts so you can take advantage of lower fees.
Source: Wall Street Journal Online