Project a mutual fund's future value net of its expense ratio, and see the fee's real cost against a fee-free comparison.

How to Use the Mutual Fund Calculator

Fill in the initial investment, monthly contribution, gross annual return, expense ratio, and years. Try nudging the expense ratio by half a point with everything else held constant — that's the fastest way to see how much of the projected balance a fee this small actually claims.

A 0.5% expense ratio doesn't get billed like a subscription — nobody sends an invoice for it. It's deducted continuously, shaving a sliver off the fund's return every single day, which means it compounds away right alongside your gains instead of sitting off to the side as a flat, one-time cost.

Net Return = Gross Annual Return − Expense Ratio
Future Value = same growth formula, run once at Net Return and once at Gross Annual Return

This calculator runs that future-value formula twice on identical contributions — once at the return you actually keep after fees, once as if the fund charged nothing at all — and the gap between the two runs is the fee's real cost, in dollars, not just a percentage.

Take the defaults: $10,000 to start, $200 a month, 8% gross, a 0.5% ratio, over 20 years. Net of fees that grows to $155,354.32. Fee-free, the identical contributions would have reached $167,072.11. The difference — $11,717.80 — is more than triple every dollar the expense ratio deducted directly, because each year's deduction also erases the growth that money would otherwise have kept earning for the next nineteen years.

Raise the ratio to 1.5% instead — still a modest-sounding number — and net return drops to 6.5%. The same $10,000-plus-$200-a-month plan then finishes at $134,648.65: another $20,705.67 gone, on top of the first ratio's damage, from one extra percentage point charged every year. Half a percent looks negligible on a fund fact sheet. Compounded over two decades, it isn't.