Talk to me about mutual funds.

[Exterous]

1% for an advisor to manage someone's account is in the ballpark of average. The killer is that it is on top of the expense ratios of the funds held in the account.

Thats not always true. Often financial advisers will have access to a pool of funds that would cost you x% on your own but are included with their fee. YMMV but some of them have pretty large pools of funds to select from

 

[Exterous]

Also want to note that people still have to do their homework even when considering an index fund. For example, the Rydex S&P 500 fund is an index fund, but somehow they still deign to charge an expense ratio of 1.55% on Class A shares. Most of that money goes to the advisors who sell the fund to clients.

While I'm not sure I found the exact fund you're talking about I think its RYSOX. If thats the case they don't call it an index fund just that it "Seeks to provide investment returns that match, before fees and expenses, the daily performance of the S&P 500® Index"

Which would be dumb to try and do anyway since thats before fees and expenses...

Not that they do a good job of that anyway:
http://www.morningstar.com/funds/XNAS/RYSOX/quote.html

I do like that they have a fund that tries to beat the index by 200% but can't even match the index:

http://www.morningstar.com/funds/XNAS/RYTTX/quote.html

There definitely are a lot of shitty mutual funds out there.