M1 Finance Review After 2 Years of Use

so today we're gonna be doing a review on m1 finance after using it for two years now i'm gonna tell you about the pros and the cons from my personal experience when utilizing this app now before we get started if you're gonna be interested in signing up with m1 finance i will have a link for them in the show notes down below that does help support out the channel but it gets you started right away with using the service now the first thing we're going to talk about when using m1 finance is the fact that it's entirely for free there is no cost to getting started with m1 finance aside from the deposit you need to put in to have your money start working for you in the market now that's honestly one of my favorite things when it comes to utilizing a service now another great pro on top of the fact that it's just free this is a great platform for a set it and forget it kind of mindset so if you are either like a beginner investor or maybe a little bit intermediate but you don't want to be so hands-on with other platforms where you have to be very diligent so this is a great platform to pretty much set everything up and then just have your money automatically coming in and it does all the work for you now one of the cons when using m1 finance is that there is only one time of day that they actually do their trades so to some investors this is a complete how on their end and i totally understand but for myself and a lot of other long-term investors especially dividend investors like myself that doesn't really matter too much because we're typically just trying to focus in on the long-term strategy of getting money in the platform and on the market instead of actually trying to worry about timing the market so only one time of trading unless you have what they call m1 finance plus which is an additional service that you do have to pay for but it gives you the option of having two different time frames to be able to trade one in the morning and one at night we'll talk a little bit more about that here in just a minute now we mentioned earlier about one of the pros being the fact that you can set and forget this app now one of the things you can do is actually set up individual sectors and what i mean by this is you can group up stocks in different ways depending on how you want so if you want a fast food restaurant you can have a fast food sector or if you want a beauty sector you can have all the beauty different companies put together in one sector as well and the great thing about this is it really helps you get an idea of how each section is doing based off of the stocks that are in them in comparison to your overall portfolio and that really helps get an idea of how everything is working and if it is going up to par with what you are expecting now of course when it comes to creating those sectors you are able to put in individual stocks or etfs as well so you have a lot of different options for you to be able to fill up your portfolio now one of the cons when it comes to filling up your portfolio is the fact that there is a maximum of a hundred different stocks that you can actually have access to in one account you can actually create multiple accounts if you would like to but keeping in mind that 100 is the max you can have in one individual account depending on each individual investor that might be a pro or a con because you might not want that many stocks in your portfolio now one of the cons when it comes to investing with m1 is the fact that to have it automatically invested you do need a minimum of 25 dollars in the account to have that money start working for you automatically you can manually buy into those individually if you so chose to but automatically you do need that 25 or more to have that work but speaking of how that money goes into your account the great thing about m1 finance and this is probably one of my favorite features is the fact that they have fractional shares fractional shares are one of the greatest things when it comes to investing because instead of having to spend say 200 on a microsoft stock you can put 20 in and get a small portion of that full share allowing you to get your money to start investing for you and m1 finance does this fantastically across the board with any stocks that you add into your portfolio or even into smaller sectors to be able to have that money working for you instead of waiting for a full dollar amount to be able to buy a full share now m1 finance does have what they call money weighted returns when it comes to looking at your overall portfolio and this can be a negative for some investors depending on what you're looking for and how you're tracking your returns the nice thing is they do have the unrealized gains weighted returns available for you as well but not at the front end of actually looking at your portfolio this might not matter for a lot of people but to some this can be a con on using the service but again you do have access to both ways of determining how you're performing in your account so m1 finance has a great pro where if you are depositing your money to be able to invest the very next day that money you deposit will actually be available to invest that next day into the market instead of having to wait two to three business days for the money to cycle from your regular bank into m1 finance the way they do this is essentially with like an instant deposit type of feature to have that money in the account to be able to be invested with so you're not sitting there waiting days upon days it is going to be invested the very next business day to get your money working for you faster so as i mentioned this app will not be for every type of investor a lot of those day traders or you know bigger investors maybe somebody that's more experienced might not see the value in m1 finance in comparison to somebody such as a beginner or even somebody like myself that is somewhat more in the intermediate side of investing and of course that is going to be determined based off of each individual investor so when it comes to depositing money into m1 finance the minimum to deposit is going to be 10 into the account which then you can manually buy into stocks but as you recall the minimum to auto invest is 25. so keeping in mind that minimum to deposit is ten dollars and minimum to auto invest is 25. if you get over that 25 everything will just kind of work in a flow to make things easier on your end when it comes to investing now on top of the fractional shares another great feature that m1 finance has is effectively their drip which is the dividend reinvestment program because they do that auto invest over 25 effectively any dividends that you have paying out for you will get automatically reinvested into your overall portfolio which is fantastic that's how compound interest really works in your favor is getting that money back into the stock market to start working for you even faster so the drip program effectively works because of the auto investing over 25 now one of the cons for me when it comes to earning dividends because i'm a dividend investor is the fact that your dividends kind of show up a little late but they still pop up on the day that they are due so the downside is i can't utilize that money right away i had to wait till the next day but that's not as big of a deal in comparison to the fact that it just auto reinvests for me if i hit that certain threshold now a cool pro that m1 finance has is they do have a m1 borrowed feature so if your account hits a certain dollar amount you can actually borrow against it either to invest more which i'd be cautious about or use that money for other things at a really low interest rate so for me i think this is a cool feature and something i've definitely utilized in the past as well but something you can check into on top of just having the investing portion of the app now another con is the fact that m1 finance plus which like i mentioned earlier gives you the opportunity to buy multiple times in a single day has some other great functionalities but can be a little costly at times the great thing is if you wait for special promotions you can get this deal for a really nice price point but again this is just an additional feature nothing that is required for the actual service so before i give you the last pro when it comes to using m1 finance i do actually want to tell you the score i would give m1 finance as a personal user for the last two years and this would actually be a 4.4 out of 5. and the reason for this is because the pros definitely outweigh any of the cons across the board but i think it's a great app to utilize for a lot of long-term investors such as myself and especially dividend investors such as myself as well i think this works great for even intermediate investors as well that maybe want to do that set and forget i think it works great across the platform on apps and on desktop as well so if you're interested in checking them out i'm gonna have that link again in these show notes down below help support me out but it gets you started right away and that last great pro when it comes to using the service is kind of what i just mentioned is the fact that the app and the desktop work really really well i think they work fantastic across the board they function really nicely and once you kind of get an understanding of how the app works i think it's one of the best out there when it comes to investing but the nice thing is instead of having to worry about how everything works i have a tutorial list right over here so you can learn exactly how to set everything up and get through the process of that little small learning curve so you can get started on investing into the market my name is dennis and i'll see you in that next video

Channel: TruFinancials

Views: 26,409

Rating: 4.8173785 out of 5

Keywords: m1 finance, m1 finance review, m1 finance app review, m1 finance review 2019, m1 finance review 2021, m1 finance review 2020, is m1 finance good, is m1 finance good for beginners, is m1 finance a good idea, m1 finance app review 2021, m1 finance app review 2020, m1 finance app

Id: 0BV6xewlEik

Length: 8min 27sec (507 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 01 2021