Costs and Financial Aid. The cost of attendance is the total amount of tuition, fees, room and board, books, supplies, and other estimated school expenses. Financial aid is a combination of grants, loans, scholarships, and work-study employment designed to help offset the total cost of attendance.
One of the major problems for an investor looking at that 10% average return figure and mistakenly expecting to realize a nice yearly profit from investing in the S&P 500 is inflation. Adjusted for inflation, the historical average annual return is only around 7%.
Likewise, the average return for the total bond market will differ from the average return on U.S. Treasury notes. The time period under consideration also influences average returns. For example, while the stock returned an average of 11.31% from 1928 through 2010, it returned an average of 3.54% from 2001 to 2010. Index investing is a form of passive investing that aims to generate the same rate of return as an underlying market index, no matter how low or how high that return is.