Betterment Investing Review

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.