Between brokers fees & management fees those can easily drain half the value of a mutual fund over 30 years.
You don’t need 1-3% in fees to get lower ROI than a passive index fund with 0.25% MER. But a salesman at a bank will absolutely tell you otherwise.
No, a mutual fund with 1-2% MER is not the same as an ETF with 0.25% MER. One of them steals half your money while the other does not.
Believe it or not it is very financially lucrative to drain up to half of people’s retirement funds while disguising it under opaque language they know people won’t understand (like MER, brokerage fees) while “”justifying”” their fees with hopes that they would outperform the market (which they don’t).
Sorry to break it to you but your parents were raised in a world where we had less data on these things. We now know their work over the years drained people of their money and siphoned it up to banks.
They didn’t need to be conscious of it for that to be the effect. That’s simply what happens. And because these are risk adjusted opportunity costs people don’t know better.
Moreover your parents worked in a market when 0.25% MER All in One ETFs didn’t exist. So it’s a moot point.