Craig Wear, CFP®Craig Wear, CFP® | Expert in Roth Conversions & Tax-Efficient Retirement Strategies for IRA Millionaires

Is This Eating Away at Your IRA?

29 May 2026 · 1 min

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1:01

In this segment, financial planner Craig Wear, CFP®, explains how seemingly small investment and account fees can silently erode the growth of an IRA over time. Using a grapes‑and‑wine analogy, he illustrates that daily, modest fee “pecks” accumulate, leaving the account balance significantly smaller than it could be. He highlights that lower IRA balances also reduce the amount of wealth available for Roth conversions, further diminishing retirement outcomes. Wear advises viewers to move beyond looking at individual fee line items and instead assess the total all‑in cost of their IRA, identifying where hidden expenses are sneaking in.

Chapters

This drag works very quietly. The account can still go up. It can look healthy, but some of that growth is quietly getting eaten away over time and your account balance ends up smaller than it could have been. In fact, much smaller. So let's say now and then some birds come and peck on some grapes. Annoying, sure, but if it's just a few grapes, you'll still get plenty to make wine from. No harm done, right? But if you let this happen every day, over time you end up with far less grapes than you should have had. A lot of people think about investing fees the same way. They hear 1%, maybe a little more inside the funds, and it's all so small, they just assume, eh, it's just the cost of having the account. And that's not just about the account. It hits Roth conversions too. A smaller IRA means less wealth to convert from. Fewer grapes, less wine later. So how do you tell if this is happening to you? Well, if you don't know the total all-in cost of your account, that's a big warning sign. So instead of looking at your individual costs, look at what your IRA costs you in total and where those costs are actually sneaking in.