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How do fees quietly eat your returns?

By Mehdi, Senior Sukuk Fund Manager · Updated May 2026

This is the silent leak almost no beginner pays attention to, and it deserves your attention precisely because it hides so well. Let me show you the scale of it.

Fees feel trivial in the moment — "only 1.5% a year, what's the harm?" The harm is that the fee is charged every year, on your whole balance, and it compounds against you exactly the way your returns compound for you. Over twenty or thirty years, the difference between a low-cost fund and a high-cost one charging a couple of extra percent can quietly amount to a large fraction of your total gains — money that left your pocket bit by bit without you ever feeling the cut. The fee did not look big; its lifetime shadow is.

Where we stand: you cannot control the market, but you can control your costs — so we treat keeping fees low as basic stewardship of the amanah, not penny-pinching. Favour low-cost screened funds, understand exactly what you are being charged, and refuse to leak years of growth to fees that bought you nothing. It is one of the rare guaranteed wins in investing.

Carelessness with the trust shows in small leaks as much as large gambles. To watch even the quiet costs — to not let years of barakah drain away unnoticed — is part of handling what Allah lent you with the attentiveness a trustee owes its Owner.

This is education, not personalized financial advice or a religious ruling. Screening status can change, and your situation is your own. Confirm a specific holding against its current Shariah screening, and any ruling with a qualified scholar you trust. The decision, as always, is yours, before Allah.