How to you manage when you are forced into these relatively higher fee fund companies? Do you transfer the money out every year to somewhere cheaper? What are the rules regarding this?
Yes. Transfer out as soon as it vests without penalties. Read your benefits package, it should say.
I have Manulife, so similar....
A couple of bonus items with these--
1. there is no cost to rebalance / transfer money between funds for me, within the account, so I use it more actively to rebalance my entire portfolio, which contains funds outside of it that charge ten dollar trading fees.
2. The management fee on the fund was written up a bit differently than mutual funds are traditionally charged, and it was lower than it first appeared to be. They called it something other than an MER, at first I thought it was an additional fee, but it was actually lower management admin fee than the MER charges for same funds outside of the group plan. Still a lot more than vanguard, but it helped a bit.
3. okay one more, the tax stub at year end has a lot of tax accounting all done in one form.