Estimates only — not financial, tax, or professional advice.
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What it calculates: Weighted average expense ratio, Annual fee cost, Total invested.
Updated 5 June 2026 · Transparent assumptions
A cheap fund holding most of the money dominates an expensive small one
Averaging the published ratios treats a holding of 500 and a holding of 50,000 as equals. The real cost is each fund’s ratio weighted by its balance, which is usually far closer to the largest holding’s figure than to the simple average.
This cuts both ways. A portfolio that looks expensive because one small satellite fund charges 1.5% may in fact be cheap overall — and one that looks cheap can hide a high ratio on the fund holding most of the money.
A ratio is abstract; the money leaving each year is not
The calculator reports the annual cost in currency alongside the percentage, because 0.6% does not feel like anything while a number of rupees or dollars does. On a large portfolio that figure is often a noticeable fraction of a year’s contributions.
It is also deducted from the fund’s returns rather than billed, so it never appears on a statement as a charge. That invisibility is precisely why it goes unexamined for years at a time.
Half a point sounds small and is not, over thirty years
An expense ratio does not only take its percentage each year — it takes the growth that percentage would have earned for the remaining term. Over thirty years a difference of half a percentage point commonly consumes something in the region of a seventh of the final balance.
This is the strongest argument for checking a portfolio’s weighted ratio at all. It is one of the very few inputs to a long-term outcome that you control directly and completely.
Trading costs, platform fees and taxes sit outside it
The published ratio covers the fund’s management and operating costs. It excludes the fund’s own transaction costs from trading its portfolio, any entry or exit load, brokerage or platform charges, and the tax drag from distributions.
A high-turnover fund can therefore cost more than its ratio implies, while a platform fee charged separately on the whole account adds to every holding equally. Treat this figure as the largest single component of cost, not the total.
Sources & References
Figures on this page are checked against primary, authoritative sources. Links open in a new tab.
Returns are assumptions, not guarantees. Actual results may vary because of market performance, taxes, fees, inflation, and timing. This is an educational projection, not investment advice.
Published the calculator with its formula, worked example, assumptions, limitations and a bespoke guide, and added an automated formula test suite covering it.
Tested the balance-weighted ratio across up to four funds against a hand-computed total cost over total assets.
Tested that the weighted ratio always falls between the cheapest and dearest fund in use, and equals a single fund when only one holds money.
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