So if as a dumb LTJG, one opened a mutual fund and Roth IRA through First Command, where would one look to see if/where they’re sucking money away from er, that individual? Asking for a friend.
The money goes straight from checking to 3rd party (well known) brokerage firm...it’s not like FC ever “touches” it.
Take a bit to look into the expense ratios of each of the funds you are contributing to. The tricky thing about high expense ratio (i.e., high-fee) funds is that you don't get a neat little deduction on your statement every month titled "Management Fee" or something like that. Rather, the gains you make are just...less. Over the course of a long time (e.g., the life of a retirement account), high expense ratios can take a
large cut out of your total principal, and those funds have no track record of performing any better than other hands-off index funds available to the average consumer.
That said, I think you also
do get nice little fees charged by First Command for every contribution (forgot how they manifest, but it's something like "Custodian Fee").
Overall, FC's whole schtick is, "You're busy saving the world, let us give back to you by helping you take care of your money." Then they tie your money up in expensive, inefficient funds that are extremely difficult to get out of, and they sway young kids into buying trash whole life policies while they're at it.
A newbie investor could put very little effort into learning how to dump a monthly allocation of money into a set-and-forget Vanguard index fund and never look back at it again, should that be their desire -- and they'd likely come out with a LOT more when it was time to withdraw funds.
Edit to add: I just helped a friend transition to Vanguard from First Command, and her ~$100K of savings was split across something like 25 separate mutual fund tickers with like one to six thousand dollars in each one. Her statement she received from First Command was absolutely daunting. I'm going to wager that a company that has to diversify across 20-25 different mutual funds is probably making investing deliberately difficult for the consumer, thereby increasing the attractiveness of "just letting First Command keep doing what they're doing." But that's a completely uneducated hunch on my part.