Free Trades on Low-Cost Funds
Charles Schwab offers the best deals on low-cost investments.
Guide to Scoring the Best Deals in 2018
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Index mutual funds and exchange-traded funds are investors’ go-to low-cost investments—and Charles Schwab has a lock on the best deals these days. More than 250 ETFs trade commission-free at Schwab. The list covers all major asset classes and many industry sector funds. All Schwab-brand ETFs make the list, naturally, including Schwab US Dividend Equity (SCHD), a member of the Kiplinger ETF 20, the list of our favorite ETFs. Others hail from SPDR, Invesco and WisdomTree.
Schwab also offers 11 of its index mutual funds with no minimum initial investment and no transaction fee, as well as its suite of index-based target-date portfolios. Some of the funds charge annual fees that are as low as Schwab’s ETFs. Schwab S&P 500 Index fund (SWPPX), for instance, costs 0.03% per year. That’s cheaper than the Admiral share class of the Vanguard 500 Index fund, which requires $10,000 to start an account and charges 0.04% in annual expenses.
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Nellie joined Kiplinger in August 2011 after a seven-year stint in Hong Kong. There, she worked for the Wall Street Journal Asia, where as lifestyle editor, she launched and edited Scene Asia, an online guide to food, wine, entertainment and the arts in Asia. Prior to that, she was an editor at Weekend Journal, the Friday lifestyle section of the Wall Street Journal Asia. Kiplinger isn't Nellie's first foray into personal finance: She has also worked at SmartMoney (rising from fact-checker to senior writer), and she was a senior editor at Money.
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