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Are you and your investment advisor (if you have one) making the absolutely best investment decisions? You’re not if you take fees, charges and expenses into account. Even if you can instantly describe the difference between GOOG and GOGIX (see the answer below), you may not fully realize how this laundry list of expenses can devour your profits or make your losses greater than they have to be.

Some Fees Require Disclosure

What fees, expenses and charges do you pay? If you don’t use an advisor and you buy and sell fund shares, expect to pay an expense ratio. This includes a fee for the fund manager, administrative costs and marketing expenses. Trade anything, fund shares or otherwise, and you also pay transaction fees. Have an annuity? There’s a whole page of additional fees to pay.

If you trade only mutual funds shares, their expense ratio still averaged 0.74% in 2013, according to the Investment Company Institute. Even with a slight downward trend, these fees prove a little goes a long way—right out of your portfolio and into the coffers of these investment firms.

According to an investor alert from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, a 0.75% difference in fees (1.0% vs. 0.25%) on $100,000 in investments cost $30,000 over 20 years. And that’s not counting the potential lost profit on the extra $30,000 that fees ate during this time—money you can’t invest because it went to your advisor and the investment bank.

Most people have an idea of what they’re being charged for a service, but just like phone bills and bank account statements, there are plenty of hidden or additional charges that go largely unnoticed and might be affecting your bottom line. So as for your investment accounts, like this prop from the Super Mario games, the only real way to know is to investigate what’s inside…there may be some surprises.

Other Fees Are Harder To Identify

At least mutual funds have certain disclosure requirements, even if you must dig through pages of still not-so-simplified prospectus information to find the information you want. It’s a little harder to figure how much advisors and their investment companies make from your investing dollar

Commissions averaged about 1% last year. Fees for managing assets, if that’s how your advisor makes money, are about the same. Commissions range as low as a half of 1% for mega-accounts to 2.5%. Either way, your advisor’s investment firm might tack on a markup fee, known in the industry as an inside credit. That’s above and beyond the market price if the firm already has the security you want in its inventory.

The amount of fees—both in number and dollars—is outrageous and will hurt your investing efforts. If you don’t have a list of EVERY fee your advisor levies, demand one. It’s your money.

And Sometimes, Information Is Ridiculously Hard To Find

If figuring out mutual fund expenses is hard and understanding your investment advice charges is harder, then learning how much you pay compared to peer investors is next to impossible. These investors have a similar portfolio size—assets under management. They also require about the same work from advisors, because they have a similar asset mix and trade similarly. This should be simple, right?

Good luck finding comparative information. Unless you have friends or family with the same type portfolio size and investment mix inside the same investment firm, you’ll have to drag this information from an advisor. Fees differ from one firm to the next and they can even differ inside one investment firm. There is no benchmark and they don’t have to give this information, which is why so few do.

That leaves you—the investor—guessing whether the fees you pay are fair or not. Or, instead of guessing, you can get help from someone whose job it is to understand this quagmire of secrecy in fees.

Answer to the quiz: What’s the difference between GOOG and GOGIX? Pretty much everything is different except their ticker letters, which are transposed. Google is one of the market’s darlings with a market cap of $382 billion and a per share price in the mid-$500’s.

GOGIX. the John Hancock International Growth Fund, was selling at about $25 per share. It has a front end load of 5% for A shares along with 1.55% expense ratio, according to Morningstar Morningstar .