text: The Frugal Investor (Forbes.com) Forbes.com - Why do mutual funds charge so much? The smaller, newer ones argue that they need high fees to get started. The theory is that, once they attract a wad of assets, economies of scale will bring down the fee in percentage terms. Alas, this doesn't happen very often. Fund-tracker Lipper calculates that the average size of diversified domestic equity funds has doubled over the past ten years to  #36;1.4 billion, but still the average expense ratio hasn't gone down a whit. AllianceBernstein Growth  amp; Income doubled its assets in the past five years (to  #36;7. ...