<prompt> Human: According to this, Vanguard has .04 but those other 2 have .03. Yet on this sub and elsewhere online I read almost exclusively about about investing in a Vanguard index fund and just letting it sit I have no desire to try to beat the market, I will lose. But the reason that is always recommended is because Vanguard has low expense ratios. But they dont have the lowest, so why choose them? What am I missing?  <response>: Vanguard is like the Jesus Christ of investing... They are the savior that came to save all of us from high fees, and allow the middle class to become millionaires if they so choose. In the old days mutual funds had like 837; sales commission and most did not do that great. Only the very rich had access to the financial information and tools that you have now at your fingertips for free.My father is a brilliant man, has an MBA in Finance, and was head of cash management at Chrysler. Even with all that knowledge he did not really learn about index funds, and all of this stuff to just a few years ago. When i was a kid he would try to pick individual stocks and lost most of my college fund in some bank in Texas that went bankrupt during the savings and loan crisis in the 80s... This is the kind of crap regular investors had to deal with, and these stories were common. Most people in the greatest generation were scared to death of the market and never invested after the great depression.Jack Boggle changed all this when he invented the index fund at Vanguard.Now investing has become a science, research papers are written on it, Fama and French won the Nobel Prize showing the small and value index funds outperform. There is tons of research showing how lower fees win the day.Anyone with a middle class income can live on less then they make, and take the excess money they would have consumed and throw it into a Vanguard account and buy a handful of index funds or ETFs and basically own every stock that matters on the planet earth, in almost every economy that matters on earth, for zero commission and ultra low fees. If you do that for long enough you will become a millionaire unless a zombie apocalypse, nuclear war, or asteroid strikes the earth and wipes out civilization.Vanguard and Jack Boggle gave us that opportunity.There is nothing wrong with Charles Schwab, or Fidelity or whatever. But Vanguard has a special place in my heart knowing that these are the guys who made this all possible.The link above is a podcast that explains this and will give you chills of joy. Skip the first 2:10 advertisements 