BACKGROUND: I'm a 29 year old professional woman living in a small town and making 55k/yr. I have no student or personal debt, no mortgage, no car payment. I have a 12k emergency fund and I maxed out my Roth IRA for 2013 and 2014. I also have about 180k in a UTMA account that my parents set up. My boyfriend is in a similar situation - 28 years old, professional, 70k/yr, no personal debt, decent emergency fund, 2014 Roth maxed out, has almost paid off an apartment worth 120k. He doesn't worry about money as much as I do, but he's been receptive to learning and is slowly cutting back some of his expenses. We both have some serious expenses on the horizon though - a wedding in 2016, our cars are 10 and 12 years old, and I would like to have a child within the next five years.
QUESTION: After maxing out my Roth in 2015, I have the option of contributing to my office's 401k plan. There is no employer matching for contributions. Yesterday I showed my father the mutual funds and bond options that I can choose from. (My dad has been handling his own investments since I was a kid and is pretty talented. For example, he managed to take our church's account from ~$450k in 2006 to $1.5m today. He also manages my UTMA account, which has had a 24% return this year.) Anyway, he said that the expense ratio for the funds offered was way too high - around 1.3% for the specialty funds and 1.05% for the large-cap stock funds. He said he would skip 401k contributions all together which surprised me.
Is there some kind of calculator online that shows the expense related to a fund and the tax benefit work out over time? Or how long the expenses will eat up the tax savings? What are reasonable expense ratios for the average investor? And how common is it to skip your 401k all together?
I suppose I could just hand all of this over to my dad to manage but (1) I would like how to do this myself and (2) he's a wealthy man and his advice tends to be geared toward other wealthy people. For example, I was very late in starting to build a credit history because of his pay-in-cash mentality to just about everything, including real estate.
Any advice is appreciated. Thanks.