Lord Abbett Rollover To Vanguard

[arrrrgon]

My company uses a Lord Abbett simple ira. I tried to talk my boss into switching to Vanguard, but that's not going to happen. I currently pay a 2.75% load fee on my Lord Abbett funds along with a .85% and a 1.23% expense ratio. I'd like to create a Vanguard TIRA and start rolling my simple ira funds over to Vanguard.

Does anyone know a way to do this so that I can avoid paying Lord Abbett any of their outrageous fees (I believe I can use the other share classes which have higher expense ratios, but no load fee)?

Will the transferring of my simple ira funds to my TIRA each pay period count towards my yearly $5500 dollar TIRA/Roth IRA limits? (I'd like to max out a Roth with $5500 each year)

Any suggestions? Am I better off to just suffer the ridiculous load fee?

The way I understand it is that the transfer would occur once a year, so would I be better off to just keep my investments in the highest earning mutual funds regardless of the load fees and then just transfer them at the end of each year?

Thanks for any help.

[GandK]

OUCH!

Transfers and contributions are not treated the same way, no. You should be able to do what you're describing without cutting into your limits.

Reference: Internal Revenue Code (IRC) Section 408A(c)(6)(B). In short, qualified rollover contributions do not count toward the annual maximum contribution limit applicable to Roth IRAs.