Airplane for Sale

Kim Strassel in today's Wall Street Journal online writes about a Missouri politician "who used to be a state auditor and who has pitched herself to Missourians as a transparency watchdog for the Senate." 

Read the story and think about your investment advisers and any mutual funds you own.  What do you really know about the costs they charge that waste your wealth?

"The senator recently reimbursed the government some $88,000 to cover the taxpayer-paid cost of 89 trips she took in the plane, at least one of which she has acknowledged was to attend a purely political event. Congressional ethics rules and federal law forbid using taxpayer dollars for political events...

"But reporters have dug in and this week the senator was forced to hold a conference call in which she acknowledged that she had failed to pay a whopping $287,000 in property taxes on the plane since 2007. "There should have been a reporting to the county of the existence of this airplane," she said. "There are people I could blame for this, but I know better. As an auditor, I know I should have checked for myself. I take full responsibility for the mistake." She added that she had convinced her husband "to sell the damn plane.

The story isn't ending there either.  Yesterday the Kansas City Star reported that Ms. McCaskill will owe another $32,000 on top of the $287,000 after St. Louis County calculated four years' worth of unpaid personal property taxes on the plane, plus the interest, penalties and fees."

What do you know about the costs you pay that are not revealed in specific dollar amounts? 

We teach investors at all levels how to uncover, detail, and then keep the costs that are hidden and disguised in the investment products you own.  We also show investors how to compare the costs of the services they pay to the savings you get when you own the lowest cost ETFs.