Betterment Invest & Save Money 4+

Beautiful update!

I love the update and the new logo so much I had to write a review 😍 I’ve been using Betterment for over 4 years for all my investing. I chose Betterment because of its ease of use, it’s automated guidance, and it’s low fees. I don’t know a ton about picking investments myself, and honestly I don’t want to spend my time researching or worrying about my investments. Betterment takes care of all of that for me! I just set up automatic deposits on the date of each paycheck, forget about it for a while, and watch my money grow over time 🤩

The sunrise update made me smile because the new logo is a representation of exactly how I feel about Betterment—the app truly is a part of guiding my life to a brighter future. After all, I am using Betterment to plan for retirement, so I could be using this app for the next 30-40 years!

Thanks, Betterment, for the update and for helping make my life easier and brighter ☀️

Lost their way

I’m supremely disappointed that I chose Betterment as my investing platform. I chose Betterment because it seemed they were true to their core mission of helping regular people make smart and risk conscious decisions about their finances and preparing responsibly for their retirement. The tortoise method of winning the race. Their acquisition of Makara and partnership with Gemini are a defection of those core values that initially attracted me. There are plenty of existing places where people can speculate (gamble) with their own money. Betterment should have been better than that. It’s especially disappointing given their change to their fee scheme (which disproportionately impacts younger, smaller, earlier investors. This change adds insult to injury as Betterment is basically charging people more money to lose their money. To date I’ve seen a ~15% unrealized loss across my various buckets. While true that the loss is unrealized, the fees are not. I can lose money all on my own without Betterment’s help. Moreover, there’s no ‘advice’ to speak of, and I’m ineligible for their tax loss harvesting feature. Once the market recovers and I am at a place where I can liquidate my buckets without a 15% haircut, I’m out. Until then I’ll keep investing, but not a moment longer.

Developer Response ,

Hi there, thanks so much for the feedback. I'll pass this along to the appropriate teams for review. Please reach out to our support team at https://www.betterment.com/contact and we would be happy to further assist.

Great Product

Betterment makes it easy to save for retirement or any other goal. The individual goals you can create are really nice to see how much you have saved towards each one instead of just having one large pot of money. The iOS app is super simple to use and makes depositing money or seeing performance easy.

I have not had an account long enough to really compare the returns to other investments. They recently added a much simpler view to see your annualized returns vs benchmarks on the website which should make comparisons easier moving forward.

With Betterment you are using their robo advisor so don’t expect to pick your own funds. I believe that Betterment leans a little heavier on foreign fund than other similar robo advisors. But that doesn’t really matter as you set your stock/bond percentage that matches your desired risk level and Betterment does the rest.

Betterment posts many helpful/interesting articles, but do take everything with a little grain of salt as many things are geared towards why they are right or how you can’t compare directly to other benchmarks.

All in all I have loved this investing/savings tool. I have seen good returns and low fees. The app and web interface are clean and easy to use. Recommend for anyone looking to start investing/saving. If you are a more hands on investor, Betterment might not be for you, and you might want to look else where.