Advocate for a Better 401(k) and Tax-Smart Charitable Giving
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How to improve your 401k and reducing your taxes by giving to charity. You're listening to the Saturday Personal Finance Edition of Motley Fool Money.
I'm Robert Brokamp, and this week we're going to skip the financial headlines and go straight to the interview, which is with my longtime colleague, Buck Hartzell. We talk about how the Motley Fool's 401k was actually not very good when we were first hired, how we worked with the company to improve the plan, and how you might be able to get your employer to do the same. More than 100 million Americans participate in defined contribution retirement plans such as, you know, 401ks, 403bs. Collectively, these plans hold more than $13 trillion in assets. For many Americans, contributing to an employer-sponsored plan is the primary way they're saving for retirement. Unfortunately, not all these plans are excellent, and you're stuck with the investment choices and features chosen by your employer.
Or are you? Here to join me to talk about the steps you could take to possibly improve your plan is Buck Hartzell, a senior analyst here at The Motley Fool and, like me, an inaugural member of The Fool's very own 401 committee. Buck, welcome to the show.
Thank you. A fellow rabble rouser here. Yeah, it's great to be here, Robert. I think, you know, it's starting to get cloudy here in northern Virginia and we should really be on the beach somewhere. We really should be. And I know you like We can afford to be on a beach. We've prepared pretty well for retirement. But this is a topic that's a passion of ours. I think both of ours. And it's one where I think, you know, we generally like helping people out. And so hopefully today we can help some more people prepare for their trip to the beach by maximizing their 401k and maybe prodding their employer to deliver a better plan as well.
So let's talk about our history doing this, because we've been doing this at our own company. We have been at The Fool for a long time. We both joined in the 1990s. If we were to rank all our employees, 375 of them by tenure, you're number 10, I'm number 16. So we're a couple of pretty old fools. I'm number 10.
I'm number 10. I didn't even know that. I mean, that's nice to know. I think my hairline suggests that I might be number 10, maybe number one. But yeah, we've been here a while. I started in 98. So that's been a long time and had the joy of spending a lot of that time with you and a bunch of other people here.
So one of the things that we did way back when was to work on our 401k. But let's take a quick walk down memory lane here. What do you remember about the Fool's 401k when we started back in the 1990s?
Right, yeah, I remember it wasn't very good and it was important to a group of us, namely at least three of us, And I was maybe one of the first that was like, hey, I don't really like the options we have here. And for those who are listening at home, they might probably don't know this for sure. We're on the committee, so we know this. The Motley Fool's number one choice within our 401k plan with almost 30% of plan assets is actually an index fund. It's a total stock market index fund provided by Vanguard. And that's true today. Back then we had an S&P 500 index, which is a little less diversified, right, than the total stock market index. which was great to have an index fund option, but we were paying 1.5% a year for an index fund, bro.
I mean, you remember that. I mean, fees were higher back then. This is a passive index. It's not actively managed. Nobody's really doing anything except for hitting the button to rebalance every now and then. And we were paying a percent and a half. That's a heavy fee to pay. And then If you go outside of that, we had many of other choices and I think some red flags maybe for some of them as they were mostly provided by our plan sponsor at the time, which I won't name. Some of them had even higher fees and worse performance. And so some of us were like, we can do better, right? We can do better. Let's top it. And so I think you and me and some others, we came up with like eight different funds that we wanted to add to
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