Jack Bogle retired from Vanguard's [profile] board of directors 20 years before he died this past January, yet he never completely disconnected from it in the minds of investors. What if he never disconnected his wallet, either?

The late Jack Bogle The Vanguard Group Founder

Dan Wiener, publisher of the Independent Adviser for Vanguard Investors newsletter, tells the Philadelphia Inquirer that he estimates that the low-cost leviathan would have paid its founder about $28 million last year, if Bogle still had his shares in the Vanguard profit-sharing Partnership Plan, while his successor Jack Brennan would've been paid about $16 million. (The Inquirer notes that Bogle retired in 1999 and Brennan in 2009 and that they had to give those shares when leaving.) Wiener uses these examples as a way of giving a ballpark idea about how much, for example, current Vanguard CEO Tim Buckley is paid.

"Consistent with years prior, we won't discuss the specifics of our compensation program, except to say that Partnership enables our crew to celebrate and share in the success and value they've helped to achieve on behalf of Vanguard investors," Vanguard spokeswoman Alyssa Thornton tells the Inquirer.

Wiener tells the paper that, for 2018, Vanguard is paying out $283.48 per Partnership Plan point, up 14.1 percent from 2017 and 32.9 percent from 2016. Vanguard (like most fund firms) took an AUM hit in 2018 thanks to a rough Q4, yet the Partnership Plan points payments are calculated, in part, based on AUM growth over the past three years. (The Inquirer article points to flows and "cost savings" to Vanguard's fund shareholders as other factors.

For a blast from the past, read up on MFWire's coverage of Vanguard's past Partnership Plan payments, for years including: 2002, 2005, 2008, 2009, 2012, 2013, and 2014 

Edited by: Neil Anderson, Managing Editor


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