I think the question Are 401(k) fees based on contribution amounts or total account balance? What's reasonable? actually is a two-part question, the first of which asks how 401k fees are assessed and the second asks whether the fees charged to the OP's account are reasonable.
In my opinion, neither of these two questions is a localized question.
Since there were no votes to close from the readership, and the question(s)
had received an answer from the person with the highest reputation on
money.SE, consideration of the question as a candidate for closing on
the grounds that it is too localized is
somewhat premature. Note that if this question is to be closed as
temporally local, then any question on taxes or IRAs etc
should be closed as well since the answer would be in terms of tax law
or IRA rules as they are for that year, and thus not of any use to
readers a few years down the road.
I also think that the edits have added a whole slew of additional questions
most of which are unanswerable. For example, there is no market for 401k plans and no competition. An employee is restricted to contributing to a 401k
plan of the employer. If the 401k plan is not to the employee's liking for
some reason (high fees, poor investment choices, whatever), the options
are to not contribute at all, or to find a job with another employer.
401k plans do not list their fees on public web sites but provide
this information on web sites restricted to the participants. Many major
firms run several different 401k plans for different employers with
different fee structures for each, and so any information on, say
Vanguard's, public site, is at best generic information. Thus, the
demand in the edited question for links to specific web sites is
unlikely to be met. Similarly, I believe that it is a requirement of
US tax law that each 401k plan report annually to each participant on
the performance of the participant's account as well as the performance
of each investment vehicle (mutual fund), and the fees and fee structure.
I do not know whether the second and third items have to be reported to
the IRS, but there is, to the best of my knowledge, no public
disclosure of the second and third items.
In short, I think the original question was fine while the
edited version might be worth considering for closure as unanswerable!
