The author of this post is Tony Huynh. Tony is a grad from Boise State University, where he studied Mechanical Engineering. He works as an Account Manager. In his free time, he is the face behind Good Guy Health, a website that provides healthy recipes, workouts and inspiration in a very unique and fun way.
Investing.
If you want to make the most of the money you have, you better be investing.
Now, I am not a financial advisor, nor do I pretend to be. I’m just a guy who was tired of watching his savings earn less than 1% while sitting in a savings account.
Need proof investing is a big deal?
• Warren Buffet, worth $73.1 billion – INVESTS!
• Oprah Winfrey, worth $3 billion – INVESTS!
• Bill Gates, worth $81.2 billion – INVESTS!
These multi-billionaires did not get to their fortune merely by trading hours for dollars. They made their money work for them. But where does a millennial even begin? Stocks, ETFs, Mutual Funds, Index Funds, it can get really confusing really fast!
I was in the same boat as you. I always heard that I should invest my money, but I had no idea what I was doing. Should I buy stocks? Seems really risky, and I have no idea what’s a good stock or bad stock.
Some old guy told me mutual funds are pretty good. Maybe I should hire a financial adviser to help me pick some. Wait, they want to charge me HOW MUCH? I don’t have the time or patience to wade through all this stuff!
Enter Betterment.
Betterment offers managed investments for a fraction of what you would pay a traditional financial advisor. You simply create an account, transfer your money, and decide how risky you want to be by changing the percentage of stocks versus bonds. For example, if you are younger and can be more aggressive, you would go 90% stocks/10% bonds. If you’re older and closer to retirement age, having a higher percentage of bonds would be a safer way to go, but most likely will result in a lower return.
How big of a fee can it be? Average mutual fund manager fee is 0.5% to 1%. Betterment fees range from 0.15% to 0.35%. While that may not seem like a huge amount, if you are familiar with compound interest, those can make a huge difference in the long term.
You do get features like automatic rebalancing, and tax loss harvesting (once you’ve invested a certain amount) so you are having a managed portfolio with much lower fees.
While we could dive deeper into the service, I will let you check it out only our own. If you want more information on Betterment, check out their website here. Or, if you are ready to sign up you can use this link and get the first 30 days free of any fees.
To sum it up, I use Betterment because I don’t want spend a lot of time managing investments. I set it to automatically withdraw money from my checking every month and don’t even think about it.
Big thank you Tony for your wise words and sharing your insights. Go check out his site for tasty recipes and a free 7 day workout guide.
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Thanks for reading!
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