Acorns Review | One Year Later | $25 Weekly

[Music] what's up y'all this is arie with the a ratio so for today we've got a special one for you today i'm going to be talking about my one year later review on the acorns app so what acorns is for those of you who don't know it's an investment platform that you can use to automate your investments you've probably seen some commercials with the rock or kevin durant and they talk about acorns so you might be a little bit interested to see how that works in this video i'm going to be breaking down what's worked for me what hasn't worked the pros and cons and what i like about acorns in general so let's get right into it so first off this is the user interface the home screen for the desktop the app is going to look a little bit different but both are really clean simple and one thing i really like is how the aesthetic is so clean and pleasing so you can just see like these nice colors the green one thing about acorns they're always talking about growth so i guess that's a cliche just about growth you can kind of see the roots i guess i guess that's what they're going for so anyways um you've got four options right here that you can do um acorns isn't free unfortunately but um it starts as low as one dollar a month you can get that invest for that i'm going to be breaking down each one you can see that i have three of the four so how it works is one dollar for the invest two dollars for the spend and you get to invest with it then there's a later for three dollars and you get all three of these and then you've got early for five dollars and then you get all of this so i'm gonna be breaking down the invest first all right so this is my acorns invest you can see my invest account value is at 1279.47 so this is how much value i have in my account um so you can see right off the bat these are my settings i've got an aggressive portfolio type i do my roundups and i invest 20 every monday so weekly um these are just some settings that you can play with you can have your roundups on or off you can do one-time investment so you don't have to do the recurring like i do and then you can withdraw at any time so that's one thing i really like about acorns it's super flexible you can manage your own strategy or you can just let it do acorns work for you and do weekly and then that works for you this is just recent activity so you can see i paid three dollars a month um so it's going to pop up some of my recurring investments and then here is performance so you can see i'm up 11.46 percent um just a quick google search and you can see the s p 500 is up about nine point eight percent over a ninety year time span so you can see i'm outperforming that by two percent which is amazing you can see that acorns is working for you and it's working effectively so with the subscription um it factors in for total gain and loss so you can see him up ten point eight one percent so that's one of the cons i'm gonna be talking about a little bit later uh but you can see how it just drops off about half a percent which may not seem significant but it's about what like six seven dollars and then if you have that at a higher scale you're going to be losing a lot more you technically you're not losing money because it's all made money but at the same time you can have a higher profit margin with a different account so that's one thing that i really i find a problem with the acorns but you know at the end of the day this is for new and beginning investors so this is perfect um you know i really have to do anything you just let acorns work for you and then you can see in the last 30 days invested cents five dollars 35 roundups no one times 100 and recurring 3.46 and dividends all right so now i want to talk a little bit about the portfolios and how and why i chose aggressive all alright so these are the different portfolio types so you can see there's conservative moderately conservative moderate moderately aggressive and then what i have aggressive so in all fairness the reason why i chose aggressive is it's actually not all that aggressive and i can see why they did that um the reason they did that is because if they made it too aggressive then if they were if a investor was down quite a lot they'd have to take responsibility and they'd lose faith in their investments and their investors so that's probably why they did that in all fairness i think it's closer to moderately aggressive in my opinion but yeah so in my opinion aggressive has been working for me i'm up 11 so i'm not nothing to complain about i'm not complaining pretty happy with 11 um you can see these are just the indexes that they invest in i'm not going to break it down too much just because this is a in like a beginner investor video so i don't want to go too crazy but um if we just click on vo you can see this is one of the indexes they invest in it's 316 currently um it's a little bit about it so you can see the weekly range the volume the year-to-date return so 7.3 percent and then this is just some of the holdings they have so they got microsoft apple amazon some of the greatest ones in here and then they're all weighted differently so we've got more towards that the safer higher bigger scale companies and then we've got smaller index funds like um let's see small company stocks so let's just look at that ijr i don't really know too much about this acorns recently rebalanced they used to have some other index funds like vnq but um now they've got stuff like igr which i really don't know too much about like i said i'm not going to break it down too much because this is a beginner uh beginning investor video so let's look at some of their holdings let's see if i know any of these so we got wingstop and it's probably the only one i know let's see they're up they're actually down 11.8 within the year that's um not the best let's let's take a look at that all right whatever it works for me i'm up 11 not complaining all right so when you sign up one of the first things they do is they ask you like a bunch of questions and then they recommend which portfolio would work for you as you can see modder is the best for me according to them i go with aggressive just because i know my time horizon i have a strategy so i'm pretty happy with the aggressive it's been working out like i said so i'mma go with that so let's get into the good stuff so you can see i've invested 127.70 i've taken out zero dollars i've got 10 dollars and 17 cents and found money so i'm going to explain that a little bit more so all it is is acorns gets partnerships with certain companies so every time you invest in them or every time you buy a product from them they give you a certain percentage or a deal for example um when i bought disney plus i bought it through acorns and they gave me ten dollars just for that and then there's referrals so it's five dollars per person every time you refer somebody so if you use my link in the description below you're going to get five dollars and i'm also gonna get five dollars so it's kind of like a win-win situation and at the same time if you want to look at it as you know it costs twelve dollars a year for the one dollar option so if you want to look at that way it's like sign up you get five free months that's kind of what it is and then we've got dividends i've got nine dollars and 47 cents in dividends and actually i wanted to show you guys how the snowball effect would work with dividends and i'm going to show you that a little bit later so let's first look into when i started and how it's worked out alright so i started october 14 2019 so i started with a lump sum of 20 bucks that's nothing crazy i started doing five dollars you know weekly and you can see it just building up and then we've got the roundup so every time i buy something what it does is it takes how much ever it is to close this dollar and then eventually when that amount equals five dollars it takes that five dollars and invest it for you so i'm just going to quickly go through you can see my dividends once and two set nothing crazy and then there's a rebalance i'm just gonna go quickly through this you can see five dollars five dollars eventually i moved up to 25 and then i went back down to 20. um i'm just going to try to get to the found money so you can see so you know i bought something from dunks i got eight cents i got a referral from one of my friends so i got five dollars there there's that disney plus i was talking about this real time roundup blah blah blah nothing crazy but you can just see you know i'm just putting in 25 weekly and through that i've got let's see dollars in profit so you know it all starts somewhere and you want it to compound it you want it to grow and the whole point within acorns is like i said in the beginning the video it said and forget it you just want to let it grow you don't want to look at it every day i kind of like doing it because it's fun for me but if you want to just put your 20 bucks or 25 bucks however much you want to put let's say you're a college student like me you don't have money like that to spend five dollars a week you'll be fine you know let it grow check back five ten years you know be crazy you didn't have to wait that long you wait a year like i have 132 bucks take that out keep it or you can keep letting it grow and see where it goes from there let's say you get a strategy that you want to work with let's say you figure out how to invest and then you want to take it out from here and then put into an actual um a different brokerage account that you know and you have a plan with a different platform called m1 finance and in my m1 finance account i have a different strategy that i go by that strategy is called dividend growth investing and i'd like to share that with you in a future video just leave a comment let me know if you'd like to see that and that's it for my acorns invest i just want to show you guys something real quick with the dividends so you can see in january i've got 84 cents so this is just a spreadsheet i made i got from different youtuber but it is what it is you know i'm saying all right so this 84 cents was actually october november december i was just too lazy to make a whole new column just for 2019 so i figured i'd just throw it into january all right so then you can see march i grew that dip it in by a little bit more then i grew it and then i grew and then because of the pandemic there was a little bit of an outlier so you can see it drop off but then it's continuing to grow as soon as the market's recovered so you can see it's going up over time and it's just going to continuously grow go up and up and up and that's it's like a snowball effect you know you push a snowball down a mountain it just grows bigger and bigger kind of like an avalanche so think of it as your money is working for you and the more money you put in the more your dividends will grow and then when you reinvest those dividends it'll grow and grow so it might not look like much remember when you saw the one cent two cent dividends you're like yo what's the point of waiting a whole quarter just to get two or three cents but that two or three cents one day will be worth you know so much more be worth five dollars then one day you'd be making five dollars in dividends and that five dollars would be worth ten dollars and it just keeps going up and up and like that and that's just how it works all right so that's all i've got for the acorns invest i want to show you guys the other options so this is the acorn spend smarter feature so this is going to be two dollars a month and then you're also going to get that one dollar invest so what spend is is basically like uh online baking for you so you can see i've got 216.46 so it's basically like another bank account just online you can see you can transfer money in you can send checks you can locate an atm you can set a recurring deposit um i don't have one on just because i don't really use it i send maybe like a certain amount of my paycheck here and then from here i just transfer it over to my m1 finance account um let's see i also automate a little bit to my later which is i'm gonna explain that a little bit later uh see what i did there but um yeah so later it's just a retirement account i'm gonna get into that but um i don't really use this feature too much you can see with the urn so what you can do is earn is it's kind of like a cash back system where if you invest into something so remember that disney plus thing i was talking about so if you have to pay through acorns and that's one thing that's kind of annoying so if i wanted to go um if i want to get let's see see something cool let's see stockx so if you guys don't know a big sneaker head i'm planning to do a video on that later on just let me know leave a comment so let's say i want to get a pair of shoes on stockx right so i can go through stockx and buy with my normal debit card or credit card and then get my five dollars invested i'd have to either use my acorns card that comes with the spend so they give you a debit card for that and then i'll get my five dollars or i'd have to go through here so that click on stockx and then i'll do shop now and then it's this is just some of the details that you have to do you have to make sure you do it right and then you buy the shoe or you buy whatever and then you get the five dollars so that's how that works overall spend is pretty good i don't i don't really use it too much to be honest um other than that it's it's a pretty it's a pretty decent feature the online banking you can make it work for you i i have my own being so i don't really mess with spend that much but other than that it's pretty good lastly we've got my acorns later so you can see my later account value is 110 and 10 cents so what acorns later is is essentially a retirement account for you so if you guys know what a roth ira is this is basically what your roth ira would look like on acorns so for those of you that don't know or you begin your investors out there a roth ira is basically a retirement account so all the money you put in gets pre-taxed and then when you take it out you don't have to pay any taxes whatsoever so it's essentially a way for you to save money and to retire so there are a few catches like i said i'm not gonna break it down too much but you have to be 59 and a half to take it out you can only do six thousand dollars a year so right now um i'm 22 years old i don't have money like that to put um 6.6 grand in a year you know i was in so i do five dollars a week so i used to do 25 into my invest but i changed that to 20 and then now i do five dollars a week here i figured i'd start now rather than later just because i know i won't be maxing out that 6 000 yet um i also don't really have that much of a plan because i plan to retire early so it's not like i need to max it out right now because you know like if you're already retired early i'm hoping for my late 40s early 50s i'll break that down in another future video i've got a lot for you guys but um like i said if i'm planning to retire early what's what's it gonna do for me if i have all the money in here rather than having it later and don't get me wrong it's great to have this it's basically like a safety fund you know i'll show you guys a graphic later on um in my future video but you know if you start at 18 and you put six grand every single year you get to own close to two million dollars a year and you can pull that all out tax free so it's amazing but like i said i don't really have a plan or strategy with my roth ira once i create one i'll let you guys know i create a video for that um but yeah this is all i have for now for my acorns later um you can see do five dollars weekly i transfer i want to say like um so i send a small percentage of my paycheck to my spend so my online banking from before and then i do like five percent from there to here so at least it's starting to build up a little bit you can see them up like four dollars 3.7 percent um nothing crazy you can see my values 115 bucks this is the money transferring in 25 cents of dividends and it's pretty much all i've got you can add a bedroom fishery but i cannot say that word beneficiary so like if you pass away or something happens to you they can get all that money so they're going to get all of my 110 bucks nothing crazy but um like i said it's it's definitely worth it but you can recreate this account and you can actually do it for free instead of spending three dollars a month um with a different platform like you can do with the robin hood you can do with m1 finance you can pretty much do with any account so i guess it's okay unless you want to automate your purchases all right so that's all i've got for my later and i'm going to be talking about some other features and pros and cons right after this so just a quick little edit just in case you guys thought i was capping about that 2 million by age 65 so 6 000 a year you start at 25 by the time you're 65 you have 1.4 mil and that's all yours no tax you take it out you keep it yourself i'll talk about that in a future video but if you guys want to just pause the screen take a closer look um and just read anything or you know admire how cool that is yeah go for it all right i'll get right back to the video alright so now i'm going to be talking about some of the other features i didn't talk about earlier all right so we've got the early so what that is is you can set up a custodial account for your kids so kids aren't allowed to invest until they're 18 years old so within a custodial account you can actually start them off earlier and with acorns that you can do that for five dollars a month it's a pretty cool idea i don't really have any kids so there's no point of me doing that but if you're if you're an older person or if you have kids and you want them to start investing at an early age so going back to that roth ira example um if you do 6k a year they're going to be at 2 million by the time they're 55 something crazy like that i can show you guys a graphic in a later video but um like i said you can start them off early have them retire early have them have a happy life you know i'm saying all right so that's just that early feature all right now let me show you this view potential feature this is probably one of my favorite and coolest features that they have on acorns all right so it shows you a hypothetical uh projection of your invest so right now i'm investing 20 every monday so if i keep that up i'm 22 right you're uh 22 years old right now so what's that like 16 years i don't know i'm bad at math all right 16 years from now i'll have 40k which is great so i'm a thousand i'll be at 40k if i keep doing 20 a year this is with my roundups on so you can see i'm investing 24k and then i'll get 16 000 returns which is amazing you can play around with it so let's see if i want to be a little bit older so let's see how i'm going to do at 53 131 k so let's say my income increases and i'm able to invest a lot more let's say i don't go too crazy let's say 150. let's see how that works boom right there by the psalm 53 i'm gonna have 721 000 which is insane and on top of that i'm only investing a fraction of what i'm making what my returns are so i'm going to be investing 254 000 and i'm going to be getting back 466 000 which is just amazing and you can play you can play with it let's say um all right there's no way i'm going to do 150 a day but let's say monthly you know it's lower but let's say so 150 times four so let's just say do 500. boom it's crazy you know what i'm saying you can just play around with it and this is probably one of the coolest things if you want to make a plan you can base it off this okay so that's all i have for you guys for my personal acorns um i just want to quickly run through the pros and cons um some of the pros are it's super easy to use like i said you could just set that recurring fee or that one time fee and then you're done after that it takes a subscription right from you um you don't have to do anything else you it goes right along with that said and forget it type of strategy or approach you don't have to do anything it's all automated that's one of the best pros i don't think there's a single platform that's automated like acorns is we've got that roundup feature which is pretty cool um yeah overall it's all easy super easy the user interface is nice um other than that they've got something called grow your knowledge which is just a way for you to learn if you're a beginner investor perfect for you they have so many articles that you can learn from they also send i want to say it's like weekly emails just telling you what happened in the market for right now for example it's election season so um they'll be talking about nancy pelosi or they'll be talking about um trump and things like that and you can see hawaii and how the markets reacted and it's just it's just an overall cool experience with the emails it's not super spammy um there's also a lot of growth that so i've noticed that i want to say maybe when i first started investing there was no such thing as spend there's no such thing as later it all came over time you know they're consistently adding more and more to their platform even for earn um they didn't have all these brands before maybe like it was like dunks and like couple other things but they keep adding new and new partnerships so it makes a little bit better um it just makes it more interactive and you know i noticed that um they sent out the email a couple days ago talking about a job finding career so they just keep adding new things for um investors that are using their platform um like i said it's perfect for beginning investors um so if you find yourself not knowing anything this is perfect for you right so let's get into the cons there isn't really too many cons that i can save but my number one overall con would be the subscription fee so obviously one dollar is not going to kill you but as you can see it kind of cut into my profits so if you remember on my invest i was losing about half a percentage just in my subscriptions there is a way around it um if you want to do the referrals that you have so icon does a lot of promo so right now it's like if you uh refer one person you get 35 bucks or i remember a couple of months ago they had something crazy like refer i think it was like eight people get 500 bucks so something crazy like that and you just make 500 bucks just like that but um other than that it'll hurt your margins so like to me it was like seven dollars right but let's say i have a bigger scale let's say um let's just say i'm rich you know and i put 70 or i put 100 000 instead of 1000 right it's not going to be seven dollars it's gonna be seven thousand dollars and i don't know if my math is right on that but it's either seven thousand or seventy thousand i'm not good at math um but like i said it's gonna hurt your margins and if you know what you're doing there's really no point of acorns acorns is for beginning investors so um just for example right we're talking about that roth ira if you know what you're doing why would you spend three dollars a month you know then like you can just go on m1 finance or robinhood or any of these other platforms and make a retirement account there for free instead of spending three dollars a month so that's just one of the the biggest cons that they have it's not nothing crazy other than that i love acorns you know they give you a lot of room to grow i'm gonna keep it up and i'm gonna plan i'm gonna plan to you know just keep investing in here and if you guys want to see a future update i'm going to keep everything here so maybe i'll do a six month update or maybe i'll do a more in-depth video on acorns um i'll break down some of the indexes or something like that um anyways that's been it for my video i appreciate you guys listening watching and i doubt any of you guys made this far but if you have leave a like comment subscribe i'm hoping for like two likes because it's my first video and honestly this has been fun alright that's all i've got for you guys today um thank you so much oh and by the way i'm also doing a podcast with a couple of my friends so i'll leave a link in the description when that's out so take a look it's going to be a basketball podcast it's going to be fun all right thank you guys so much

Channel: The Aray Show

Views: 2,779

Keywords: acorns, invest, investment, portfolio, millionaire, rich, makingmoney, money, investing, oneyear, growth, robinhood, m1finance, longterm, dividends, dividendinvesting, appreciation

Id: cWnKOpucsLs

Length: 22min 46sec (1366 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 20 2020