Acorns Spare Change Micro-Investing review – investing for the rest of us

PM Bottom Line: Acorns won’t make you rich, but a very easy, automatic way to save, without being too painful.  Your spare change can add up.  If you can spend $5.67 at Starbucks, you’re probably OK saving the $.33 that that Acorns would take when rounding your purchase to $6.  See?  Painless?

 

Anything that you can “set and forget” is something Productive Mama wants to check out.  That applies to cooking (freezer meals and my crockpot or Instant Pot), housekeeping (my Magnetic Laundry System), and saving money (Ebates and Honey).  Today I’ll be talking about automatic savings for those of us who may not have an extra thousand to put into savings each month.

 

Acorns works on the premise of of what they call micro-investing, or growing your wealth by automatically investing your spare change. They want to help you plant your tiny acorns and help them grow.  It’s for anyone. You open an account and connect it to the bank accounts that you use for every day purchases.  You can then set Acorns to round-up any purchase amounts to the next dollar.  So if you buy something for $9.25, Acorns will ask if you want to invest the $.75.  Once those small amounts reach $5, you can move that amount to your Acorns account, which is an investment portfolio of stocks and bonds.

 

Of course you can also set a recurring investment or just move over any amount of money you want at any time. But most of us can do that any time.  We just don’t DO that.  Acorns is appealing because it takes those smaller amounts from each purchase and automatically helps you tally them and move them over, via app or website.  I know people who would always round their checks up and then tally those amounts up and move that much over manually. But I never did it before.  Acorns makes it super easy so that it actually gets done. It also might earn more than the typical savings account interest.

 

*There is a $1/month fee (or, if you are motivated and invest over $5,000, .25% of your balance once a year).  So you want to be sure you’re putting in more than that per month.  That’s not too hard.  For that $1 you get automated investing, unlimited linked cards, and easy deposits and withdrawals at any time.  They recently started working with brands that will deposit a (very) small percentage of what you spend with them into your account, but I haven’t used that at all yet.

 

This is not earth shattering, buy any means. But if you’ve been wanting to save up for a special trip, house project or other purchase, this might be an easy way to gather that spare change, electronically, and let it earn interest.

 

Using this link, Acorns will give you an extra $5 after you make your first deposit.

 

*These fees are waived for all students.  This is defined as anyone under the age of 24 or who has registered their account under a .edu e-mail address and lists employment as “student”.

 

This post may contains affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, I might benefit in some way. Please feel free to check out the full affiliate statement and disclosure here.

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