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will affect the size of your returns over time.

Fees and Expenses
Like any other business, running a mutual fund costs money, including shareholder costs, investment advisory fees, advertising, marketing, and distribution expenses. These costs are passed along to customers (investors like you) by imposing fees and expenses. By examining and understanding these additional charges, you can determine if this is a good place to put your money or not.

Every fund has regular, recurring operating expenses. Typically these charges to investors come directly out of fund assets, which means that investors pay for these charges indirectly. In addition, some fund groups also impose "shareholder fees" directly when you buy or sell shares of these funds. The SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) requires these fund groups to disclose operating expenses and shareholder fees in their prospectuses in a "fee table" near the front of the prospectus. Examining this fee table is key to understanding the costs of owning a particular mutual fund.

Shareholder Fees
Among the types of shareholder fees an investor might find are the following:

* Sales Charge (or "load") on Purchases
This is the amount you pay when you purchase shares (known as "front-end load"). This cannot be more than 8.5% of the investment by Federal law.

* Purchase Fee
While the front-end load goes directly to the broker, the purchase fee goes to the fund group to defray the fund's costs associated with purchase.

* Deferred Sales Charge (or "load")
This is the fee charged when shares of the fund are sold by the investor (known as the "back-end load"). The most common type is referred to as CDSL or CDSC (or "contingent deferred sales load"). The amount paid depends on how long the investor keeps his or her shares.

* Redemption Fee
This fee goes directly to the company when an investor sells or redeems shares, unlike the deferred sales load, which goes to the broker.

* Exchange Fee
This is a cost imposed by the fund group when funds are exchanged or transferred within the same group or family of funds.

* Account Fee
These are fees for maintenance of the investor's shares, and are often imposed when the dollar amount invested is below a certain threshold.

Asset Fund Operating Expenses
In addition to the fees listed above, there are also additional costs that may occur:

* Management Fees
These are costs paid to the investment advisor for his or her management of the overall portfolio.

* Distribution and Service Fees
Frequently called 12b-1,

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