New to Investing? Let This App Do The Work (And Help You Earn Like a Seasoned Investor)

What do you really want? What are your actual financial goals?

A better car? A post-pandemic dream vacation? An emergency fund? A healthy college fund for the kid? A comfortable retirement?

To reach your goals, you’re probably going to need to invest. That’s because just sticking your cash in a savings account won’t do much for you anymore. These days, you’ll likely earn practically zero interest on your savings that way.

Now, what’s the best way for you to get started investing? 

If you’re new at this — or even if you’re not — you should look into an investing platform called Betterment. Over the long term, Betterment is dedicated to helping you keep more of your hard earned money in retirement.*

How Betterment Could Help Steer Your Investments and Grow Your Money Faster

Launched in 2010, Betterment is considered the pioneer of robo-investing. Today, it has more than half a million users, and it manages more than $32 billion in assets.

It’s easy to use; it has low fees; and it does all kinds of important and tricky work for you. 

How does it work? Here are the basics:

First, answer some quick questions about your age and income and when you hope to retire. Based on your answers, Betterment will recommend a portfolio of low-cost ETFs that track the stock market as a whole. 

You can set up auto-deposits to steadily feed your investments.

New to investing? You can start slow, if you want. A lot of investing apps require you to keep $1,000 in your account at all times. With Betterment, there’s no minimum account balance to maintain and you just need a $10 initial deposit to start. 

Plus, this is an affordable way to invest. Betterment charges an annual management fee of 0.25% of the balance of your investments. For example, if you invest $1,000, you pay them $2.50 a year to manage it. That’s a fraction of what traditional investment advisors charge.

How does Betterment do this? It uses technology to steer your investments. Their platform is built for long-term investors who want a professionally managed portfolio at a low fee.

Helping You Reach Your Financial Goals 

Betterment’s algorithms can do all kinds of things automatically, like investing strategies, tax loss harvesting at the flip of a switch and rebalancing your portfolio when it gets out of whack.

Don’t know what any of that means? You don’t have to. This is a “set it and forget it” strategy, and we mean that in the best possible way. You get the ball rolling and then let Betterment do its work.

Of course, you can invest for other goals besides just retirement. And here’s where Betterment can shine.

When you sign up for a Betterment account, you’ll enter some info about your goals, and they’ll help take care of the rest! For example, maybe you’ll want an emergency fund that could pay your bills for several months in a pinch. 

You can add your own personal goals, too, and Betterment can help you invest to achieve them.

Get started here. It takes just a few minutes, and you could be on your way to hitting your goals.

 

Mike Brassfield ([email protected]) is a senior writer at The Penny Hoarder. You better believe he invests.

 

*Investing involves risk. Performance not guaranteed.