How to fight all those hidden charges

This is important, since you -- and not your company -- pay the bulk of 401(k), 403(b) and other workplace retirement plan expenses. Whether the charges are itemized on your statements, or, more commonly, silently deducted from your returns, you're paying the price.

A cost difference of just 1% annually can have a huge effect on your future nest egg. A worker with a $49,000 balance in a plan could wind up with $82,000 less if his expenses average 1.5% over 30 years instead of .5%, Hewitt estimates.

Now, just about any 401(k) plan is better than no plan at all, so don't let fear of fees keep you from contributing. But workers who agitate for better disclosure and lower fees have had luck driving changes at some companies, Hess said.

If you can't get an accounting from your plan or your employer, look out for these warning signs that you're paying too much:

• Your plan offers regular mutual funds. If your plan offers the same funds that any small-time retail investor can buy, you're probably paying too much. When buying retail funds, "a plan with $100 million in assets is paying the same as someone off the street investing $1,000," Hess said, instead of using its size to win discounted expenses. Many popular funds are available in institutional versions with substantially lower expenses. And some plans also offer "commingled" or separate accounts, which lack the public track record of most funds but also have discounted expenses. Look for funds with expenses of 0.5% or less. (You can check a fund's expense ratio on MSN Money by looking at a Snapshot page like this one for the Vanguard Institutional Index fund and scrolling down to the "Fees and Expenses" section.

• You're with a small plan. Unfortunately, small employers often wind up with the costliest plan options, either out of ignorance or because they don't have enough workers to attract the bigger, lower-cost providers. There's not much you can do beyond encouraging your employer to look for the best deal -- or looking for a job at a bigger company.

• Your options are variable annuities. Variable annuities have an added cost known as "mortality and expense" or M&E, which is designed to cover the investment's insurance features (typically a death benefit that few employees will ever use). While some plans, like TIAA-CREF's, specialize in keeping expenses low, other providers can pump up M&E and ongoing investment charges to the point where the annuities cost 1 or 2 percentage points more than a comparable mutual fund.

If you have options besides variable annuities, choose them. If you don't, ask your employer to provide some.

Travel fees

For years, the major travel-comparison sites charged their customers for booking airfares -- they just weren't upfront about it, typically tucking the fee into a catch-all for "taxes and service charges," if it was disclosed at all. "For a long time, the sites weren't as transparent as they could have been," said Beau Brendler, director of Consumer WebWatch, which evaluates online travel sites. "A lot of people were surprised that they were charged" for booking a ticket.

Today, the three majors -- Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz -- include the $5 to $15 fees in the airfares they quote and disclose them as specific line items before asking a traveler to book the trip.

But there are still plenty of other fees you might easily miss. Travelocity and Orbitz, for example, impose a $30 fee of their own when you make changes to a ticket. That's on top of the $25 to $100 the airlines typically charge; CheapTickets' fee for changes is $50. Changing or canceling hotel reservations can also incur a $25 fee at most sites.

The sites typically don't disclose if they're charging a fee for booking discounted hotel rooms, but Brendler recommends anyone interested in the cheapest rooms spend plenty of time comparing the options at different sites -- and then call some hotels in your city of choice.

"A lot of times we found a better deal going directly to the hotel," Brendler said.

Liz Pulliam Weston's new book, "Easy Money: How to Simplify Your Finances and Get What You Want Out of Life," is now available. Columns by Weston, the Web's most-read personal-finance writer and winner of the 2007 Clarion Award for online journalism, appear every Monday and Thursday, exclusively on MSN Money. She also answers reader questions on the Your Money message board.

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