<prompt> Human: My apologies in advance for a very long post, but I desperately need help understanding and deciding on the future of my retirement savings. I want to start by saying that, in exchange for your thoughtful review and advice, I will be awarding Reddit gold to no less than 3 of the posts that I feel are the most thorough and helpful. Some background information for starters: Im 33 years old and Ive been married for 7 years. In 2010, I opened a ROTH IRA and two regular IRA accounts one for me and one for my wife for tax purposes with Northwestern Mutual NWM going forward. I had previously worked with a guy who ended up at NWM, so when he approached me about retirement savings, I went with him and trusted his advice. I still think hes a trustworthy guy overall, but after watching the recent John Oliver segment on retirement accounts and the related PBS Frontline episode, The Retirement Gamble I was immediately worried that I was paying too much in fees. There was an also an extensive discussion about the John Oliver segment on this subredditI emailed my advisor and asked him for a breakdown of the fees I was paying. I received this reply I replied, Ill be honest - I think these fees are too high and my research indicates that its not worth keeping my money here long-term just to have a managed fund. Can you lay out your argument as to why it would be best to keep my money with NWM rather than moving it all to a low-cost index fund elsewhere? Our returns over the past few years have been poor, even relative to the market as a whole. Im just looking out for our best interests. A phone call ensued, which led to this second email from my advisorI replied, Thank you for your time this morning and this wealth no pun intended of information. I very much appreciate the work you put into this. I havent finished reviewing it all yet, but my primary initial question is: if both the variable annuity and the Global Growth Portfolio are trailing the 2050 fund in both the 5 and presumably 10 year averages, why should I expect this to change in the long term? I understand your explanation of the additional exposure due to heavy losses in BRICS and other emerging markets, but why should I be comforted by this explanation considering the general volatility of the market as a whole? Isnt this just the nature of the beast, and if so, why is the 2008 event particularly unique? He called me to explain that the two NWM funds focus on emerging markets while the Vanguard funds do not, so the 10 year slice of time between 2006-2016 looks particularly bad for the NWM funds and uncharacteristically good for the Vanguard funds, which are largely focused on US blue chip stocks. He said the years prior to 2006 were actually really good for emerging markets, so this particular snapshot 2006-2016 is a skewed perspective.At this point, I feel like Im in over my head. My gut tells me that Im missing something in the information hes giving me, and that the Vanguard low-cost 2050 retirement target date index fund is the way to go, but I cant parse all this information to figure out exactly why. I also dont really understand the annuity piece and the locked in mortality rates, which he says is one of the advantages of staying with NWM, as I have already paid some of the fees related to this.Again I know this is a ton of information, but Im kind of at a loss about what to do. Thank you so much for reading. Your feedback is greatly appreciated. Thank you so much.  <response>: Furthermore, if you roll your old 401k into this account, which I would recommend that you do, you will pay a onetime 4.5 sales loadNo!!! Run away fast. 