Wall Street has developed a new way, clouded in obscurity, to fleece the hundreds of millions of Americans who have money invested in company pension plans, mutual funds and insurance policies. Institutional brokers are legally obliged to execute trades on the exchange that offers the most favorable terms for their clients, including the best price and likelihood of executing the trade. The 12 exchanges, most of which are owned by New York Stock Exchange, Nasdaq and Better Al

Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co. has agreed to a nearly $31 million settlement in an excessive-fee lawsuit involving the firm's own retirement plans, joining the ranks of other prominent retirement services providers that have settled allegations over their company 401(k) plans. The class-action suit, Dennis Gordan et al v. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co. et al, concerned two of MassMutual's retirement plans: the$2.2 billion Thrift Plan and the $200 million Age

Edward Jones is being sued by a participant in the company's 401(k) plan for allegedly causing employees to pay high fees for investment management and record-keeping services that supposedly cost them millions in retirement savings. Many of the allegations in proposed class-action lawsuit, McDonald v. Edward D. Jones & Co. L.P. et al, which was filed Aug. 19 in Missouri district court, will be familiar to those following other excessive-fee cases against sponsors of multibil

It's been two days since Yale, MIT and NYU were sued for excessive fees in their retirement plans, and lawyers have already added four more to the pile: Duke University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Pennsylvania and Vanderbilt University. The same law firm, Schlichter, Bogard & Denton, is responsible for each of the seven university lawsuits, which allege breach of fiduciary duty under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 for allowing the plan to

For the second time in two months, a small 401(k) plan is at the center of a lawsuit alleging excessive plan fees. The independent broker-dealer, Cetera Advisor Networks, has been named as a co-defendant — a move experts call a twist of sorts from other 401(k) litigation. The suit alleges fiduciaries of the $25 million Checksmart 401(k) plan breached their duties under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 by allowing “grossly excessive” fees to be charged for i

In many of the retirement plan excessive fee suits involving large plans, it is argued that the size of the plans' portfolios gives them real bargaining power to negotiate lower fees for investments and administration. A new lawsuit argues that a $9 million dollar plan also has the ability to negotiate for substantially lower fees than an individual would pay. The primary argument in Damberg v. LaMettry’s Collision, Inc. is that LaMettry’s 401(k) plan used higher-priced retai

Stay the course, pay attention to the big picture, and don’t sweat the details. That string of mantras makes sense for saving and investing, but only up to a point. Once you start paying attention to fees, it becomes clear that the details really matter. Years ago, I began to notice that although I was faithfully socking away money into an I.R.A., my account wasn’t growing much — not compared with the overall returns of the stock and bond markets. Something was holding me bac