Last weekend, my dad told my mom that their "retirement guy" had called and told them to transfer their assets from one mutual fund to another. Upon hearing this, I asked who "their guy" was and what the fees and performance were for these funds. They didn't know either.

According to Teresa Ghilarducci, a professor of economics and retirement specialist, this is fairly commonplace: "I repeatedly hear about the 'guy.' When I ask how much the 'guy' costs ... or if their investments do better than a standard low-fee benchmark, they inevitably don't know."

Though I actually think my parents will be just fine in retirement, this uninformed approach to retirement planning will be a major crisis in coming years. According to recent estimates, there are 58 million Americans between the ages of 50 and 64. The median retirement savings for this group is only $26,000 per person.

To give you an idea of how scant that $26,000 will be when combined with Social Security and spread out over the rest of one's life, consider this: Almost half of these middle-class workers will be living on a food budget of $5 per day.

According to Ghilarducci, a safe rule of thumb is that you must have 20 times your annual salary saved up by the time you retire. If you earn $75,000 per year, you need $1.5 million saved up to retire with a similar lifestyle.

Even those who are saving are getting screwed But even if you are doing a great job saving for retirement, there's an insidious, almost undetectable culprit eating away at your savings: mutual fund fees. Whether we are forced into certain plans by our employers or choose them based on our "guy's" suggestions, mutual funds are still a popular vehicle for retirement savings.

A casual glance at a mutual fund's expense ratio might show a seemingly low percentage that you're charged each year. My parents, for instance, had been locked into a mutual fund with an expense ratio of 1% for decades. It seems low, but those fees can really add up over time.

Let's take a relatively simple example and assume my parents' mutual fund earned 9.8% per year -- the S&P 500 average between 1970 and 2011 -- and that they've been putting away $5,000 per year for 40 years. At this point in time, their savings would total about $1.7 million.

Source: Author's calculations.

Of course, these kinds of returns aren't too bad. The problem is that a group of Wall Street "pros" have been getting rich off folks like my parents for years, and not enough people realize it. You see, the 1% charged every year is what the mutual fund's managers charge for their "expertise" in picking winning stocks and sectors.

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The Shocking Retirement Numbers That Will Blow You Away