<prompt> Human: My employer uses Valic for our 401k. Not too surprisingly, Valic at least with our company requires you to set up your 401k through a representative of theirs, rather than letting you create an account and pick funds yourself. I was extremely dubious of this when my HR person told me this as I knew exactly what was going to happen - lots of pressure into high-fee funds under the guise of helping me make good choices.Overall, all of our fund selections suck, with the cheapest ones having an ER of 1.3. Some of them went as high as 2.x. The entire phone conversation was nothing but this rep trying to talk me out of index funds and into more expensive actively managed funds, often a full 1 more expensive. He didnt try just once or twice, but five or six times before he finally backed off, accepted what I wanted, and told me he would reach out to me in a few months to see what changes I wanted to make.Im actually fuming about this because Im sure he coerces most of my coworkers into these shitty, expensive funds. Almost all of them had a 10 year average of performance below their US market funds, which he tried dancing his way out of by saying that when they have a good year, its a GOOD year.. as if that totally made up for their lacking performance and higher fees.Im smart enough to realize everything he told me is bullshit, but not smart enough to explain what hes doing in terms of numbers. Im going to write a letter to my HR person describing the BS he was pulling, but Id also like to give examples of how much he could cost the average person in terms of higher fees. Can someone direct me to how I would calculate comparisons of x contributions with y and z fees? Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks  <response>: I dont think you need to try and postulate the numbers... just contact your HRBenefits person and let them know your experience with the provider... just like you did here. I think the HR person would be more interested to know that he was trying to strong arm you into expensive funds; if their background is in HR, they may not even understand all of the financial terms and the numbers. 