If you've compared retirement or unit trust products before, you've probably run into an Effective Annual Cost, or EAC - a single percentage meant to sum up what a product costs to own. It's a genuinely useful number, and it's worth understanding what it measures, which products it was built for, and where to look for the real cost of everything you hold with us.
NOTE: An EAC is a product-level measure. Where you hold a product that falls under the ASISA standard, the cost disclosure belongs to that product - not to the wallet it happens to sit in.
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EAC Basics
The EAC is a standardised way of showing what an investment product costs to own, expressed as a percentage of your investment per year. It was created by ASISA (the Association for Savings and Investment South Africa) so that two products from two different providers can be compared on the same basis, instead of you trying to reconcile two differently shaped fee tables. It's usually shown over set time horizons - 1, 3, 5 and 10 years, or to the end of the product's term - because some costs weigh more heavily in the early years than later ones.
Related: What costs does an EAC include? · Which products does the EAC standard apply to? · Fees and costs on EasyEquities
Four categories, defined the same way by every provider who publishes one: investment management, advice, administration, and a catch-all bucket for other charges. Splitting them out is the point of the exercise - it shows you which slice of the cost is the fund manager, which is the adviser, and which is the platform administering it all. Where a component doesn't apply to your situation, such as advice on a product you bought without an adviser, it's shown as zero rather than quietly folded into the rest.
Related: What is an Effective Annual Cost (EAC)? · Where do I find the cost disclosure for a specific product I hold? · Unit Trusts
The ASISA Retail EAC Standard was written for financial products with a defined wrapper and a defined set of benefits - unit trusts and other collective investment schemes, linked investment service provider products, life-wrapped investments, retirement annuities and preservation funds. Exchange traded funds count too, since an ETF is a collective investment scheme whose units happen to be listed and traded on an exchange rather than bought directly from the fund. Those products have a fixed shape, which is what makes it possible to model their charges over standard periods and compare them fairly against a competitor. Where you hold one of them, the cost disclosure belongs to that product and comes from the provider who runs it.
Related: How is a wallet different from an EAC-type product? · Where do I find the cost disclosure for a specific product I hold? · EasyEquities Retirement Annuity (RA)
EAC and Your EasyEquities Wallets
Your EasyEquities wallets - ZAR, USD, GBP, EUR, AUD - are open-ended transactional accounts rather than products with a wrapper around them. A single wallet can hold shares, ETFs, unit trusts, bundles and baskets at the same time, in whatever mix you choose, for as long or as short a period as you like. There's no fixed term, no single benefit structure and no predetermined investment, and those are precisely the three things the EAC method needs before it can project a cost out over ten years.
Related: Why can't you give me one EAC across my EasyEquities account? · Which products does the EAC standard apply to? · Costs on your international accounts
What we can give you is every fee we charge, line by line, in our cost profile and on your monthly statements - the numbers that are actually true for your account rather than a projection. A single blended figure across a wallet would mean assuming how often you'll trade, whether you'll convert currency, and what you'll be holding a decade from now. Assume too much activity and we overstate what you'll pay; assume too little and we understate it. Since the whole purpose of the EAC is to help you compare accurately, publishing a modelled average here would work against the thing it's meant to do.
Related: Does how I use my account change what I pay? · Where can I see what EasyEquities charges me? · EasyEquities Cost Profile
Considerably, and that's the honest reason a single percentage doesn't hold up. Someone who buys one ETF and leaves it alone for five years pays very little; someone trading weekly and converting between ZAR and USD pays meaningfully more, because most of what we charge is triggered by activity rather than levied as a flat annual percentage on your balance. Your statements show what you actually paid over a real period, which tells you far more about your costs than a projection built on someone else's behaviour.
Related: Why can't you give me one EAC across my EasyEquities account? · Where can I see what EasyEquities charges me? · Optimising your EasyFX fee
Finding Your Actual Costs
Three places, depending on what you're after. Our cost profile lists every fee we charge and exactly how each one is calculated, so you can work out a cost before you commit to anything. Your transaction history on the platform shows charges as they happened, line by line, which is the quickest way to check a specific one. And your monthly statements set out what was charged over that month, with VAT shown separately. Between them you can see the brokerage, administration and other platform fees on your account, which is the closest thing to a personal cost record you'll find.
Related: Where do I find the cost disclosure for a specific product I hold? · Does how I use my account change what I pay? · How do I get statements for my account
It depends on the product, because the disclosure comes from whoever runs it. For a unit trust or an ETF, the minimum disclosure document, or factsheet, sets out the total expense ratio, transaction costs and total investment charge for that fund. Some ETF factsheets go further and publish an EAC calculated to the ASISA standard, in which case you can read the figure directly rather than working from its components. Bundles publish their management fees on the bundle itself, and the administration fees on retirement products are set out in the applicable cost profile. Those product-level numbers are the ones that sit alongside our platform fees to make up your total cost.
Related: Can you help me get the EAC for a product I hold? · Which products does the EAC standard apply to? · Unit Trusts
Yes. Submit a ticket with the name of the product you're asking about, and we'll get the request to the right team. Where the product falls under the ASISA EAC standard and a disclosure exists for it, we'll either point you to where it's published or arrange for it to be sent to you.
Related: Where do I find the cost disclosure for a specific product I hold? · What costs does an EAC include? · EasyEquities Cost Profile
What This Article Doesn't Cover
You won't find our actual fee percentages here, deliberately - rates change and there should only ever be one place holding the current ones. For those, see Fees and costs on EasyEquities or the full EasyEquities Cost Profile. For fees on your global accounts specifically, see Costs on your international accounts.
EasyTrader, EasyCrypto and EasyProperties each work differently from an EasyEquities wallet and carry their own fees, none of which are covered above. Their cost structures are set out in their own cost profiles and support articles.
How your account is taxed is a separate question to what it costs, and it's handled in our tax and statements articles rather than here. Nothing in this article is a recommendation about whether a product suits you - if you want that, it's a conversation for a licensed financial adviser.