5 Questions: Roth IRA's, Investing 10K, and Using Acorns

Competition is heating up among the Robo-Advisors. We get a lot of emails asking which is better: Acorns vs. Betterment vs. Wealthfront so we broke down each of the services to see who deserves your investment.

 The whole point of going with a Robo-Advisor is the ease of use. Based on the research, it’s highly unlikely you’ll outperform the market on your own. Better yet, if you tried to do it on your own, it would be much more expensive.

For someone just looking to invest with the right service, it’s getting harder and harder to tell where you should put your money.

Before we get started, I also wrote an incredibly in-depth Betterment Review, an equally detailed Wealthfront Review as well as interviewed the Acorns founders so if you’re looking to go even deeper check those out. In this article, I’ll be focusing more on the nuances of each service than the nitty-gritty features and how they work.

Let the Robo-Advisor battle begin!

A Birds Eye View

Every good investment comparison needs a sexy chart breaking down the differences. I’m not one to leave you wanting so bask in its glory:

Promotions

Students Invest For Free

Up to 6 Months Free

Invest $15,000 Free

Management Fees

0.25% a year

0.25% – 0.5% a year

0% – 0.25% a year

Minimum Deposit

None

None

None

Automatic Rebalancing

Yes

Yes

Yes

Tax Loss Harvesting

No

Yes

Yes

Assets Under Management

$73.6 Million

$5 Billion

$3.5 Billion

iOS App

Yes

Yes

Yes

Android App

Yes

Yes

Yes

Taxable Accounts

Yes

Yes

Yes

IRAs

Yes

Yes

Yes

On paper they’re very comparable but as you know, the magic is in the details. In order to objectively compare Acorns vs Betterment vs Wealthfront I’ve come up with three main rounds the services will battle in to win your investment.

Round 1: Ease of Use and Sex Appeal

Acorns has a beautiful app and a beautiful website. It’s one of the best-designed apps on my phone by a long shot. I’m of course not the only one to notice this – they’ve won some design award every year since they opened their doors.

That’s sexy investing, am I right or am I right? This Round was just going to be called Ease of Use, but Acorns elevated it to Sex Appeal. I’m willing to bet this is the biggest way they get people to try them out. Sexy screenshots.

That can also be a downside though. We’re about investing for the long-term here so if you need to keep opening your app just to see the pretty colors; you’ll also see daily fluctuations and go slowly insane.

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