401(k) International Index Fund

In the last few minutes before tonight's General Membership meeting, let me do a little house cleaning and catch-up.

A commentator recently asked about getting a less expensive international fund tucked into the TAG 401(k) Plan. Here's what we came up with:

Mass Mutual has made available the State Street International Equity Index Fund with a .68% admin fee (that's 68 basis points). It's almost a percent less expensive than the managed international funds now available.

This index fund is rated three stars by Morningstar (pretty normal for an index) and it gives exposure to large cap foreign stocks in Europe, Japan and the Pacific basin. (There's a .2% exposure to South America, but we're not talking about a lot of emerging market equities here.)

The fund tracks the MSCI EAFE index that contains approximately 1200 foreign stocks.

Naturally, the TAG 401(k) Plan trustees will have to sign off on adding this fund, but we'll hopefully get it into the plan in the near future.