Acorns: Invest Spare Change 4+

No Feedback on Account Setup

Acorns has since solved my problem, turns out they were simply experiencing a serious backlog to new accounts looking forward to the weeks ahead to see how much I can round up on my card transactions.

—— old review below—-
Like everyone I was very excited to start rounding up sadly I never had the opportunity to experience any of the feature sets Acorns has to offer. The account setup was pretty easy and enjoyable although finding out after signing my certificate that it still would take 1 - 3 business days to verify my account was a bit disappointing but I get it. Here is where Acorns fell short, till this day 5 days later it still says I need to wait 1 - 3 business days for my account to be setup, uh hello it’s been 5 days! Like any American on day 3 I picked up the phone and called support, I was on the phone for about an hour before I got disconnected due to interruptions in service. I also tried email support but have heard nothing, no confirmation to my email over my support ticket nothing, maybe somethings up with my email but at this point I would prefer to speak with a human being and I think any service offering to make transactions from your bank account should support quick and easy customer service. I am open to changing my review if I ever get any support to rectify this rogue issue.

Developer Response ,

Hi there, we are very sorry to hear about your experience and we'd like another chance to assist you with your account. Please email us at support@acorns.com at your earliest convenience.

Great for Investing - Spend is garbage

I like investing on here. Yeah, savings are mainly through round-ups, but I’ve saved a lot. The spend account, however, neither makes sense nor connects to anything within Acorns. You would think you could just move money between your other accounts but it really is just a one way bank account. So I have no idea what the point is. Most people signed up using another bank. If you withdraw funds they go to that bank. You can’t even move invest funds to spend. It seems like they will send you plenty of notifications about your unused spend card but not explain that it is a separate bank account that cannot be linked to your other accounts in any seemingly useful way.

Edit: I did talk to customer service again and figured out what was making spend more difficult. It might be a decent primary checking account, but I won’t be using it for that.
One thing I do like is that round-ups are easy. The other thing, which is easy to forget, is that Acorns will alert you when outside funds are low and pause investments, even when your primary bank doesn’t. Customer service is good, and aside from that time when everyone thought Acorns was hacked and started freaking out because the app kept closing, logging you out, or saying your login info was wrong, it’s been pretty solid. I lost a bunch of funds when Covid tanked the economy but I’ve mostly gained it all back. Probably from spending money to live, but that’s neither here nor there.

Unnecessarily Complicated

I am not going to pull any punches here. If you are looking for a 2nd chance banking option or the best of both worlds you will not find it here. Take the Banking off of the featured products and this app will please you. Acorns IS NOT A BANK. You can do no banking here whatsoever, there is no documentation or literature to explain how this thing works. I have had this app for almost a month and I cannot perform any checking account actions. You need a bank account for this app to do anything. What??? So wait. You need a bank for your banking app? That is because you cannot fund it any other way because it uses your bank account to syphon funds from it. How much it takes from you account, when and how often is complicated to understand and you can easily accidentally transfer too much, overdraw your account and good luck reversing it as these things take forever. Check deposit? Not happening. Bill pay? Not happening. Loans or credit card options? Not happening. Instant transfers? Not happening. All you get is “feature not available” so you figure we’ll let me complete this milestone or maybe when the card comes it will work. Not happening. This app dangles carrots and nothing more. It explains nothing, provides you with nothing it just takes and takes and buried it in the app. If you have money and time to waste on an app that looks like a duck , quacks like a duck but isn’t close to being a duck, you have it here.

Developer Response ,

We are sorry to hear about your experience and would like to look into this for you. Please contact our support team at: https://help.acorns.com/contact or by phone at (855) 739-2859.