Fees can eat heavily into your investment returns, but there are several ways to keep your investment fees to a minimum, according to The Wall Street Journal.

When it comes to choosing a financial adviser, if you opt for a major Wall Street firm, you'll generally pay about 1 percent of your assets. For that fee you'll receive several services, including money management and retirement planning.

But you can reduce that fee significantly if you're willing to accept less service, The Journal explains.

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You can get a basic financial plan, including a model stock-and-bond portfolio, an estimate of your retirement needs and a household budget analysis, for $500 to $1,500, Eleanor Blayney, consumer advocate for the Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards, tells the paper.

You can find an Internet service for less, and executing your stock transactions through a discount brokerage on the web only costs $8.82 per trade on average, according to NerdWallet.com.

Then there are fees on mutual funds. The average expense ratio for a fund was 1.25 percent last year, according to Morningstar. But fees for index funds are much lower. For example, the SPDR S&P 500 exchange-traded fund has an expense ratio of 0.09 percent.

On the financial adviser front, there's good news for investors: pressure from consumers is apparently forcing some advisers to lower their charges.

"We're receiving more phone calls asking to have this discussion about fees," Carl Bailey of Bailey & Beatty Financial Services tells Investment News.

"We aren't being forced to lower fees across the board, but we are discussing why we do what we do and explaining the services we do for clients that we don't charge for."

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