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I choose to invest with Betterment instead of Vanguard or Schwab, much of it comes down to the ease with which I can interact with their services in comparison.
by jhspaybar 11y ago
I choose to invest with Betterment instead of Vanguard or Schwab, much of it comes down to the ease with which I can interact with their services in comparison. Betterment has a nice iPhone app, and even in the app, everything I could possibly want to do is no more than 1 or maybe 2 touches away.
For comparison, I rolled over quite a bit of money from a Vanguard fund into Betterment in part because the interaction with my money was more difficult in Vanguard, and I pretty much had to use the website. I also have a work plan with Fidelity invested in a target retirement fund with very low fees, but again the app and how I interact with my money is terrible in comparison.
I understand Betterment is doing less, which is probably why everything is so easy to find, but for someone like me who wants to have their money 100% in equity assets and diversified with an easy dashboard, Betterment is far and away the simplest. A nice bonus is that I can crank my allocation up to 100% stocks 0% bonds which it seems none of the target date retirement funds will allow (I have stable assets invested elsewhere and don't need the exposure in my Betterment accounts).
- hockeybias 11y agoExpect Vanguard to improve in the directions your reference.
- saryant 11y agoIf you want 100% stocks, you just buy an equity fund. Of course target-date funds don't have that, that's the point.
- bradleyjg 11y agoOf course it's your money to do with what you like, but how exactly are you interacting with your money and how often? Also if you want 100% stocks and 0% bonds you can buy VTSAX or VTI (that's US equities, if you want international ex-US there's VTIAX / VXUS).
- jhspaybar 11y agoI have monthly deposits, and mostly just check balances once a week or so. As for buying funds, yes I could do that, but I'd like a nice mix of large and small cap, domestic and foreign, and the tax loss harvesting is quite handy! This would be far more work than I want to undertake elsewhere.
- cardinals222 11y agoyou'd also have transaction costs to buy monthly and rebalance when needed which would probably cost about the same as the betterment fee.