Ladabo

Investment Growth Calculator

What fees and inflation quietly take out of a long-run investment.

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€
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Platform fee plus fund charges added together. Often 0.2% to 1.5%.

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Results update as you type. Nothing is sent anywhere.

Worth in today's money —
Balance on the statement — The headline number, before adjusting for inflation.
If there were no fees —
Lost to fees —
Total you put in —
Share of your growth taken by fees —

How this is worked out

Most projections show one number: the balance if everything goes well. This one shows the two deductions that are always applied and rarely displayed.

Fees come off the return, every year. A fund returning 7% with a 1% total charge behaves like a fund returning 6%. One percentage point sounds negligible. Compounded over thirty years it is not, because the fee is taken on the whole balance including all the growth it has already prevented.

Inflation comes off the purchasing power. A balance of 800,000 in thirty years is not 800,000 as you understand money today. Dividing by (1 + inflation)^years converts it back into figures you can actually judge:

real value = nominal ÷ (1 + inflation)^years

The line to look at is share of your growth taken by fees. People expect a 1% fee to cost about 1% of the outcome. It routinely takes a fifth or more of everything the investment ever earned, because it is charged on the pot rather than on the profit.

A worked example

25,000 to start, 400 a month, 7% before fees, 1% fee, 2.5% inflation, 30 years:

  • Statement balance: about 595,000
  • In today's money: about 284,000
  • With no fees at all: about 734,000
  • Lost to fees: about 139,000 — around 23% of all the growth

Two things are worth sitting with. The 595,000 that looks like wealth is 284,000 in money you understand, because thirty years of mild inflation halved it. And the 1% fee — the smallest-looking number on the page — cost 139,000, which is more than five times everything you contributed in the first year.

Now change the fee to 0.2%, roughly a cheap index fund. The real value rises to about 332,000. Nearly 50,000 of today's money, for changing one setting.

What this doesn't cover

  • A steady return every year is a modelling convenience. Real markets deliver +25% and −20% years in an order nobody can predict.
  • Tax is not applied. What you keep depends on where you live and what account the money sits in.
  • Fees are treated as a flat annual percentage of the balance. Fixed platform fees, transaction charges and bid-offer spreads are not included, so the real drag is usually a little worse.
  • Contributions are assumed not to rise. If yours grow with your pay, the outcome is higher than shown.

Common questions

Where do I find my actual total fee?

Add the platform or account fee to the ongoing charge of each fund you hold. Both are published, though rarely on the same page, and the fund figure may be called OCF, TER or expense ratio. Anything over about 1% all-in is worth questioning.

Why is the real value so much lower than the balance?

Because two and a half per cent a year, compounded for thirty years, cuts purchasing power by more than half. Nothing has gone wrong — the number on the statement is real, it just buys less than the same number does today. Planning against the real figure is the only way to know whether the plan works.

Should I always pick the cheapest fund?

Cost is the one variable you control and can predict, which makes it unusually worth attending to. But it is not the only one — a cheap fund holding the wrong thing is not a bargain. Compare cost between genuinely similar options rather than across different ones.

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