Acorns is an innovative investment app that gathers up “spare change” from your Online transactions & makes micro investments on your behalf in low-cost ETFs.
The Acorns investment app, previously available for Apple devices on iOS, is now also available on Google play for Android-powered devices.
The way it works is this: you sign up, provide your card information & install the app. Anytime you make use of your card to buy something for US $4.75 or US $9.99 or some such, the spare change gets swept up by Acorns instead of staying in your account.
When it reaches US $5, Acorns invests it for you. The portfolio of ETFs is diversified & automatically re-balanced for you, so it’s a passive investment where you don’t even have to take the initiative to invest because Acorns does it for you whenever you spend money elsewhere.
There are no commissions to be paid to Acorns. They charge you US $1 per month, plus an annual investment management fee of up to .5 percent of the total assets in your account. Note that the ETFs may have their own expenses, but Acorns picks low-cost ETFs with fees ranging from .05% to .20%.
All said & done, the annual costs you pay for letting Acorns make these investments & manage your assets is less than what you would pay to a traditional brokerage for just 2 trades. Not to mention the fact that you would never have made the investments without Acorns because the spare change would still be sitting in your bank account, gathering dust & the minimal interest rate that banks pay.
Newport Beach, CA-based Acorns was founded in Feb 2012 by Jeffrey Cruttenden & Walter Cruttenden. Walter is the company’s CEO & Jeff is the COO. The company has raised US $9 million through three founding rounds, including US $300,000 in seed funding in June 2012, a US $2.5 million Series A funding round in Oct 2013 & another US $6.2 million through a Series B round in March 2014.
Click here to download the Acorns investment app on your iOS device.
Click here to download the Acorns investment app on your Android device.
Image Credit: Google play/Acorns
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