Good morning. I’m Andrew Galbraith, investment reporter at The Globe and Mail, taking over from Meera this week. Pop quiz: How much are you actually paying for your ETFs?

Like a growing number of Canadians looking ahead to retirement, I prefer to take direct control over my investments. But a new tool has me asking if I’ve really understood what my portfolio is doing.

If you own an exchange-traded fund, you’re probably familiar with its management expense ratio – the annual fee managers charge to run it, expressed as a percentage of your investment. Years of competition have brought MERs on broad market ETFs down to fractions of a per cent, keeping more money in investors’ pockets. But those fees still add up.

It was only this week that I tallied up my own ETF expenses thanks to a free (for now) Canadian website and app called Greenline.

Built on the principle that investors should know more about their investments than their coffee budgets, the app is designed as a one-stop shop for tracking and analyzing investment portfolios. Toronto-based Sammy Lau, Greenline’s co-founder, said that the idea sprang from his own attempts to understand what was going on with his money, which grew into an unwieldy spreadsheet. (Raise your hand if you’ve been there