I’ve been investing with Betterment for nearly two
years and I’m very pleased with the service. I wrote a quick initial review when I first opened the account and was impressed even back then. I noticed
that military members like the traditional military retirement, because it’s
easy and doesn’t require any involvement on the military member. Betterment makes
investing easy.
The service I’m truly impressed with is the
transparency of its advisory fees. Since I first opened the account, Betterment
has lowered its advisory fee and removed the minimum balance tiers. On your
activity statement the advisory fee is listed (see below) and you can click on
the link to read more about it. This is awesome because most mutual funds and
exchange traded funds keep the fees buried.
A quick way for me to instantly bore my readers is to
talk about portfolio asset allocation. This is a fancy way of describing having
the right amount of money in the right investments for your age and goals.
Betterment does that automatically for you using algorithms. You simply set
your stock-to-bond ratio and Betterment does the rest for you. The best part is
that you can adjust it anytime you want (see below).
Betterment then uses low-cost Vanguard mutual funds
and invests your money for you. My portfolio is invested in 10 mutual funds,
which are diversified automatically for me based on the ratio I chose. After
nearly two decades of missing my financial goals by trying to time the market,
I decided to put all my money in a single mutual fund, a Total Stock Market
mutual fund and ALSO invest with Betterment. I allow Betterment to manage the different
mutual funds for me (see below).
I’ve discussed taxes on my social media a lot. One
of your main financial goals should be to avoid taxes, regardless of your
political ideologies. You have to be financially literate to avoid taxes
properly, but Betterment’s algorithms do it automatically for you. Betterment
uses advanced methods like optimizing tax lot selection, tax-aware re-balancing
transactions, and employing tax-loss harvesting.
For anyone wanting to put their portfolio on
auto-drive and not worry about re-balancing portfolio allocations (or don’t even
understand what I just wrote), then I
highly recommend Betterment. I’ve placed a referral link every time I mentioned
Betterment. If you sign up with Betterment using the link, then I’ll get 30
days with no advisory fee and you’ll get 60 DAYS with no advisory fee.
