The Late Starter · September 8, 2026
A Chapter in My Late Start Retirement Journey
My older son worked a regular job for a while. Now he’s church planting and working as a campus minister.
Back when he had that job, he enrolled in the company’s 401(k). And when he stepped into ministry, he rolled that 401(k) into a Roth.
A Place He Trusted
He’d been using a firm for a while — one that charged a monthly fee to manage his personal finances. That rollover went through them too.
At the time, it probably seemed like the reasonable choice. Trust an expert, and they’ll take care of it properly. I lived with that same assumption for a long time myself. When you don’t understand something, hand it to someone who does.
But as time passed, a few things started to stand out.
The Fee You See, and the One You Don’t
The monthly management fee was visible. It showed up on a statement. But that wasn’t the real problem.
The ETFs and mutual funds sitting inside his Roth and brokerage accounts — I only later realized how high their own expense ratios were.
A monthly management fee is easy to notice; it’s printed right there on the bill. But the fee buried inside the fund itself isn’t. It drains quietly out of the balance, a little every year. Unnoticed, but steady.
Leave money in a managed account long enough, and two layers of fees stack on top of each other — the management fee and the fund’s own expense ratio. Each one looks small on its own, a percent or two a year. But let that compound over decades, and the story changes completely. A portion of the money that should be compounding for you quietly leaks somewhere else, year after year. And the younger you are, the more that gap widens. My son is heading toward his mid-thirties now, with a long stretch of time still ahead for this account to grow. Stopping that annual leak matters far more, over that stretch, than saving a few dollars in fees today.
A Minister Doesn’t Have Much Slack
Right now, my son doesn’t have much room to spare — financially or in terms of time. That’s just how ministry work is. It’s not the same as a job with a guaranteed, steady paycheck.
It bothered me that he was carrying a monthly fee on top of hidden fund fees, doubling up the cost. So I made him an offer.
“Don’t leave it there anymore. Let me manage it.”
Truthfully, I hadn’t been managing my own Roth and brokerage accounts directly for very long myself. After my company’s 401(k) got rolled over from Fidelity to a different provider, I assumed my old Fidelity account was gone entirely. It was only later that I discovered it was still there, still active. That was right around when I started taking retirement seriously, so I used that existing account to open my own personal Roth and brokerage accounts, and started managing them myself, studying as I went. It hadn’t been long, but in that short time, I’d built up real confidence from doing it myself. That confidence is what made me sure I could take on my son’s accounts too.
Getting His Consent, and Making the Move
With his agreement, I rolled his Roth and brokerage accounts directly from the old financial firm into Fidelity.
It took several days to about a week for the funds to fully transfer. Once I confirmed everything had moved, I rebuilt his portfolio — choosing low-cost funds suited to someone heading into his mid-thirties.
Something to Reflect On
Doing this, I kept circling back to my own history.
I understood the HSA far too late. I let my Korean national pension disappear without thinking twice. I left my 401(k) contribution rate sitting at 6% for years. I learned late, and I fixed things late.
My son, though, got to clean up his accounts at a much younger age than I ever did. Granted, this time it wasn’t something he noticed himself — I found the problem and brought it to him. But at least he won’t spend years, or decades, sitting in that same state the way I did.
I’m someone who only recently started managing his own accounts directly, and here I was, stepping in to take on my son’s as well. It wasn’t because I’d become some kind of expert. It was simply that I’d been looking closely at my own accounts and learning as I went — and that alone was enough to give me the confidence that I could handle his too.
Maybe one of the few things someone who started late can actually do is make sure their own child doesn’t repeat the same mistakes. What I learned too late, my son got to correct much earlier.
That, more than the percentage points saved in fees, might turn out to be the real return on this whole thing.