"A household with two median income earners will likely pay $155,000 in fees to service their 401(k)."

"That's roughly three years of salary for an average worker and although it's reasonable to expect a person to be paid for their services, nobody wants to overpay. That might be what's happening in your investment accounts...

The truth is that it isn't easy to know. Since advisors don't print the costs of their service on a menu similar to a restaurant, sometimes you won't know until it's too late, but here are some common ways that expenses may be eating in to your gains.

If you own mutual funds, ETFs or closed-end funds in any of your accounts, you're paying for somebody (or a team of somebodies) to manage that investment vehicle. The job of that product is to make you money, but some cost you more than others...

...Because of all the choices available to you, there's no reason to pay front-end or back-end load fees on your mutual funds.

...Fee-only advisors are supposed to be more trustworthy than commission-based advisors, because they have less of a conflict of interest, but giving away 1.5% or 2% of your year's gains to your advisor is hard to swallow. This means that in order for you to break even relative to the rest of the market, your account has to earn the same rate of growth plus your advisor's fee. That may not seem so bad in years where the bull was running in the market, but when it has a particularly bad year, you still have to pay the fee.

...Investing is expensive - sometimes more expensive than necessary. You can't control what the markets will do in the future, but you do have a reasonable amount of control over how much you pay to invest. Paying too much can add up to a lot of money over time. Focus on what you can control instead of what you can't."

http://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0812/5-ways-you-may-be-paying-too-much-in-investing-costs.aspx