Betterment

Betterment is an online investment advising company that was founded in 1998 by Jon Stein and Eli Broverman. The company has their headquarters in New York City and is registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Betterment can help investors design the right portfolios for their situations and risk levels.

Betterment Features and Investing Services

Betterment is an online investment advisory website that helps you get the best returns that are suited for you age, risk levels and investment goals. Betterment will get you better returns on your investments through diversification, automated rebalancing of your portfolio and lower fees.

Customers of Betterment can expect to have returns 4.30% higher than those that do their own investing and rebalancing. To get the most out of your investments, they use tax loss harvesting, which systematically finds capital losses to lower taxes and increase your after tax returns.

The investing advice that Betterment can help you with is catered to your life situations, your risk levels and your investing goals. This is what they call goal-based investing uses an algorithm that will let customers know if they are on the right investing track to meet their goals.

The Nobel Prize-winning Modern Portfolio Theory is the foundation of their investment methods and advice. This type of investing calls for automation and passive investing. In other words, this means that your personal and investing worries and emotions will not interfere with your investments and investing goals. Betterment believes this is automated investing but with a human touch.

Betterment offers the following services for investors:

• Fniancial Planning
• IRAs
•  Retirement Planning
• Trusts
• Tax Loss Harvesting

They offer dedicated support 24/7 as they are constantly monitoring your financial and investment situations. With their plan, they provide a customized deposit plan and portfolio that will ensure you will have a comfortable retirement.

Betterment offers a free investing advice calculator. After answering a couple questions, you will then get advice for three scenarios for a safety net, retirement and general investing. Once you enter in your answers, you will get advice as to the allotment of bonds and stocks and what you can expect from these investments. They also have total transparency on their portfolio methods.

Betterment Pricing Plans

Betterment offers the following for their customers:

• No trade fees as they do not charge you for transaction fees to buy and sell securities.
• No transactions fees when you deposit or withdraw from your account.
• No rebalancing fees as Betterment will automatically rebalance your investments when they get out of balance.

Betterment has the following fees and pricing plans:

• For an account balance of $0 to $10,000, they charge an annual fee of 0.35% with a minimum of $100 per month automatically deposited or $3 per month without the auto deposit.
• Accounts of between $10,000 and $100,000, they charge 0.25%.
• Accounts of more than $100,000 the fee is 0.15%.

There is no auto deposit requirement for accounts above $10,000. For clients that have an account balance in excess of $500,000 can schedule a one-time personal consultation with one of their financial planners.

Betterment Coupons

• $25 Bonus at Betterment

 Wealthfront

Wealthfront is considered the largest automated investment service in the world and at this time they have over $2.4 billion in client assets. They are an automated investing service that will help their clients get the best returns on their investments and automatically rebalance their portfolios of indexed funds. Their team of financial experts includes economist Dr. Burton Malkiel, who authored the book A Random Walk Down Wall Street.

Wealthfront Features and Investing Services

Wealthfront is a truly automated investing service which takes the emotion and guesswork out of investing. They use ETFs (Exchange traded funds) that track indexes for the 11 major asset classes including the following asset classes:

• U.S. Stocks
• Foreign Stocks
• Emerging Markets
• Dividend Stocks
• Natural Resources
• Municipal Bonds

Wealthfront offers retirement accounts and non-retirement accounts. Retirement accounts offer the following:

• Individual accounts, which are best for those that want to build long-term wealth in addition to their IRA and 401k accounts.
• Joint account allows you to easily manage assets that are shared between you and your spouse.
• Trust accounts help you protect and manage your trust accounts.

Their non-retirement accounts offer the following services:

• Traditional IRAs
• 401(k) rollovers
• Roth IRAs
• SEP IRAs

With Wealthfront, you will get the following advantages:

• The ability to diversify a single stock position.
• You will pay no fees and no commissions.
• If needed, they will trade every day without their clients having to worry about trading.
• Every sale will be optimized for lower taxes.

If you own a large number of shares in one stock, which many do, and you want to sell those shares, Wealthfront can sell your shares gradually and consistently. This will keep the stock price steady, and help you get the most out of selling.

Wealthfront Pricing Plans

Many companies do the same thing as Wealthfront, but charge a great deal in fees. With an account of $100,000, clients can expect to pay as much as $3,000 in fees, but with Wealthfront, the fees can be as low as $225. When you save money on fees, you make more money in your investing.

Wealthfront has the following fees for their investing services:

• The first $10,000 is managed for free
• On amounts over $10,000, they charge a monthly advisory fee based on an annual fee rate of 0.25%
• A $5,000 account minimum
• On average the annual ETF fee is 0.12%.

Automated Investing Services Conclusion

So many of us are so busy at work, with our families and daily life, it is hard to manage our retirement and investments. These automated investing services take out the emotions and the guesswork for us. They can eliminate the constant worry, while they will rebalance your portfolio and put in the right investments for your risk level and age.

Betterment has great retirement calculators on their website to let you know how you are doing at all times financially and offers a personal consultation for those with accounts over $500,000. Wealthfront divides their services into two sections, retirement and non-retirement and offers no fee for accounts under $10,000.