Acorns can help you roll your pennies into crisp hundreds with automatic savings, rounding up on purchases and inexpensive set-it-and-forget-it portfolio management. Integrate your checking, savings, investment and retirement accounts into 1 financial hub on your smartphone.
- Inexpensive subscription cost at each tier
- Smart, intuitive automatic investing strategies that utilize your spare change without leaving you cash broke
- Retirement accounts like IRAs and 401(k)s available for investment and management, which isn’t always the case with robo-advisors
- Heavy metal debit card (maybe not the most important factor but still pretty cool)
- ESG portfolios are available with Invest accounts
- No direct relationship with a financial advisor or certified financial planner
Acorns Ratings at a Glance
Acorns has the perfect metaphor for its personal financial philosophy: from acorns, mighty oaks do grow.
Using integrated financial accounts, automatic savings and investing and family-wealth oriented strategies, Acorns will help you grow whatever you have now into greater, more secure wealth — all while providing valuable insight and financial know-how.
With a fun, easy-to-use app and integrated accounts, Acorns is your digital financial control panel that uses smart auto-saving and investing technology to help you stack cash using your spare change.
Acorns features 4 main products that offer several options to help you use your change wisely.
Acorns Invest
- Acorns Invest accounts are expert-built ETF portfolios that you can invest in from RoundUps, Recurring Investments, One-Time Investments or a piece of every paycheck (Smart Deposit)
- RoundUps is an Invest feature that rounds up your purchases to the whole dollar and invests the difference
Acorns Later
- Get recommendations for a solid IRA plan. Acorns makes regular, automated investments to meet your retirement goals.
Banking With Acorns
- Online banking that automatically saves & invests for you
- Comes with a heavy metal debit card with an engraved signature
- Get paid up to 2 days early, check sending and mobile check deposit
- 50,000+ free ATMs globally
- Bonus investments when you earn from purchases
- Invest a piece of every paycheck automatically into all your Acorns accounts
- Emergency funds help you prepare for the unexpected by automatically saving a piece of every paycheck
- Real Time RoundUps, no hidden fees, FDIC-insured up to $250,000. See more details here: https://www.acorns.com/banking/
Acorns Early
- Automatically included with Acorns Family, Acorns Early is an investment account for your kids that comes with your checking, investment and retirement accounts
- Add as many kids as you’d like for no extra charge
- Savings and bonus investments from your kids’ favorite brands like Disney+ and ABC Mouse
- Family-friendly financial literacy tools
- Flexible account you can transfer from easily
With a focus on high diversification, your money is divided among a roster of asset classes:
- Real estate
- Government bonds
- Large companies
- Small companies
- Emerging markets
- Corporate bonds
Acorns also offers a useful feature called Earn with bonus investments from over 15,000 brands by shopping or with the Chrome or Safari extension. This earns you money back from brands and companies when you link a card attached to your Acorns Invest or Spend account.
Earn also connects you with available jobs and gig work that can add some extra oomph (chutzpah, etc.) to your monthly income. You’ll get $5 towards investments for every friend you refer that signs up for Acorns from your invite.
You’ll also find a wealth of financial education resources with Grow from Acorns. This is a portal into the most up-to-date news, insights, analysis and general know-how for all things money, covering topics like saving, investing, earning, spending and borrowing.
Investment Style
With help from renowned economist Dr. Harry Markowitz, Acorns combines new technology and old guard financial knowledge to bring you an innovative investment strategy. It will round up the spare change on your purchases and make automatic investments with backing of its partnerships with long-established investment management companies like Vanguard and BlackRock.
You can make automatic investments at regular intervals, like daily, weekly and monthly. With every purchase made, your spare change gets automatically invested with Rounds-Ups. Acorns invests your money in exchange-traded funds (ETFs) made up of stock or bonds.
The ETFs in your portfolio each stand for 1 of these asset classes. Acorns takes each dollar you put into your portfolio and diversifies it, distilling it into fractional shares of over 7,000 stocks and bonds. As the market shifts, dynamic auto-rebalancing adjusts your portfolio as needed.
You can choose from several portfolio models based on your investment goals and tolerance for risk.
Portfolio Models
Conservative
- Your portfolio will be 40% short term government bonds, 40% ultra short term corporate bonds and 20% ultra short term government bonds.
- Grow your wealth consistently with high liquidity
Moderately Conservative
- While keeping a focus on minimizing risk, let up a bit on liquidity, aiming for potentially larger returns but keeping a slow, steady growth pace.
- Your portfolio will be 24% large company stocks, 4% medium company stocks, 12% international company stocks and 60% government and corporate.
Moderate
- More evenly split between growth-focused stocks and risk-minimizing bonds, this portfolio aims to spur higher returns while still protecting your income from market volatility.
- Your portfolio model will be 35% large company stocks, 5% medium company stocks, 2% small company stocks, 18% international company stock and 40% government and corporate bonds.
Moderately Aggressive
- Focus less on minimizing risk to focus on higher returns by primarily investing in large company stocks, a reliable choice. Aim for even higher returns with a risk cushion by splitting the remaining allocation between riskier stock types and safer government and corporate bonds.
- Your portfolio model will be 47% large company stocks, 6% medium company stocks, 3% small company stocks, 24% international company stocks and 20% government and corporate bonds.
Aggressive
- Go all out with stock-only allocation, looking to maximize growth. This is for investors who can tolerate high risk and low liquidity, aka you can stand to let go of your invested money for longer periods of time and can tolerate losses and market volatility.
- Your portfolio will be 55% large company stocks, 10% medium company stocks, 5% small company stocks and 30% international company stocks.
Acorns doesn’t set account minimums for its checking, savings or investment accounts, so you don’t need to worry about keeping a certain balance no matter which accounts you’re using.
Acorns is available at 3 monthly subscription tiers. The Personal account covers the bases for an individual, although the Personal Plus subscription goes the distance for people with kids along with extra perks for the adults.
- Acorns Personal: $3 per month
- Investment, checking and retirement accounts included
- Utilize RoundUps to invest change
- Same savings and investing features included with Lite
- Earn bonus investments
- Tax advantages
- Financial education
- Updates regularly
- Acorns Personal Plus: $5 per month
- Investment, retirement, checking and kids investment accounts included
- All the above features included
- Exclusive bonus investments
- Family financial advice
- Acorns Premium: $9 per month
- Everything offered in the Personal Plus account
- Banking for kids with GoHenry
- Life insurance options
- No-cost will and estate planning services (a $295 value)
For Acorns Invest, there are no trade fees and it will only cost you your monthly subscription fee.
Acorns brings strategic investment and integrated personal finances to the people — anyone can use its platform and benefit from it. Signing up for Acorns is easy from their website or through the Acorns app. It typically takes less than 3 minutes before you’re set up and ready to go.
Visit Acorns here to download the app. Or look up Acorns in the Apple App store or Google Play to get started today.
What do you need to get started?
- Valid email address
- Online Banking login information
- Your physical address
- Your social security number
- General profile information
- such as: financial goals, occupation and earnings
If you’re looking for a stress-free, relaxed approach to investment, Acorns can do it for you. You can set your integrated Acorns Spend, Invest and Later accounts to your preferred automatic savings and investment settings.
From there, let it do its thing. Your portfolio will auto-rebalance with market shifts to keep you on track to meet your financial goals.
Acorns is great for chill investors, families and people who don’t want to worry about keeping minimum balances or tracking hidden fees. Download the Acorns app to get started today.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is investing with Acorns safe?
Yes, Acorns is a safe and secure investing platform.
What are the advantages of Acorns?
Acorns can help you start saving and round up purchases or invest on a small scale if you’re new to investing, want your child to learn about money or only have so much money to save or invest.
What are the disadvantages of Acorns?
While Acorns can help you save and invest, it may not allow you to do so on a scale that works for your family or personal strategy. Make sure you know which platform will work best for you.