What Should You Pay for Financial Services? 9 Answers

What they cost: 0.5% of assets (average expense ratio for U.S. non-leveraged ETFs).
Why: The vast majority of exchange-traded funds invest based on an index, which keeps their costs similar to those of index mutual funds. The average ETF expense ratio is increased by new actively managed ETFs coming on the market, as well as specialty ETFs such as commodity funds. They can have expense ratios of 1.5%.