We’ve all wanted to go ahead and invest some of our hard earned money, but don’t always know the best place to invest, or the best way to invest. Acorns is here to help. What they do is the take your spare change from everyday purchases and will then invest it into a diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds. So say you spend $29.80 at Best Buy. Acorns will take the remaining $0.20 to make that $30 and then invest it in all sorts of stocks and bonds for you. Acorns says that they have made it easy for you to invest your cash regularly, but also optimizing your investment with diversification and automatic rebalancing. They have an automated system to help you invest properly.
Now because they are handling your money and have access to your bank account, understandably security is going to be a big issue for most people. They actually use bank level security in their app and service. They will prevent unauthorized account access and will also notify you of unusual activity. Now the app is free to download, however it will cost you $1 per month for accounts that are under $5,000. If your account is over $5,0000 than it’s 0.25% per year. For those that are under 24 years of age, and those that are students (you will need a working .edu email address) it will be free for you. Acorns allows to have a $0 balance without incurring any fees. Something most banks would charge you, additionally you can deposit and withdraw whenever you’d like, for free.
Acorns tries to make things simple here and invests your cash across hundreds of the most widely held US and international companies, corporate bonds and government bonds to help you get the most out of your money. To do this, Acorns will ask you a few questions about yourself which will help it match you up with the appropriate stocks to invest in. Acorns also has automatic rebalancing. The reason for this is to optimize your returns. What they do is they keep your account in a target mix of stocks and bonds so they are buying more when they are cheaper and buying less when they are more expensive.
Right now, Acorns is available over on the Google Play Store.
