Imagine a restaurant where nobody ever brings you the check.
You eat, you enjoy yourself, you leave. And somewhere in the background, a small amount is removed from your bank account. You never see it happen. There is no receipt. If you ask what dinner cost, the staff hands you a 40 page document with the answer on page 27, in a table, expressed as a decimal.
That is your 401(k).
It is not a scam. The fees are disclosed, the law requires it, and the people running your plan are not villains. But the delivery mechanism is so frictionless that most people go an entire career without ever knowing what they paid.
And what they paid is not trivial. A one percentage point difference in annual fees can consume roughly a quarter of a lifetime balance. Not one percent of it. A quarter.
So let's open the kitchen door and look at how this actually works. There are four fee types, they come out of different places, and once you can name them you can never un-see them.