Wealthfront Investment Management

A big, fat disclaimer: I invest with Wealthfront. If you invest with Wealthfront using the link at the end of this review, you’ll get and additional $ 5k managed free (for a total of $ 15,000). And you know what? So will I.
Anyway, that’s not why I’m doing this review. I’m doing this review because:
1) There are none on Unilocal!
2) Wealthfront’s good-​looking cousin: Betterment, seems to get all the attention.
3) For most people, Wealthfront is a better deal than Betterment.
Wealthfront is a «robo advisor» what this means is that it will buy and sell investments for you, according to your risk tolerance. You can go low risk and likely get returns similar to a very very high yield savings account or go high-​risk and get potential higher returns with some days/​months/​years of potential negative returns.
They set your risk tolerance from 1 – 10 based on your answering a series of easy questions. I’m at a 10 (high risk), because I like to party.
You can change your risk tolerance once every 30 days. Once you’ve deposited your money (minimum $ 500) you can just sit back and watch it grow. When tax time comes, you can just import all your information into Turbotax with a single click. It’s pretty easy, you don’t have to know anything about investing.
So why choose Wealthfront over the other dozen robo advisors?
Quite simply: because they have some of the lowest fees. Market returns are never guaranteed and will be similar with most robo advisors, fees are not. You can’t control returns, but you can control fees. (it doesn’t mean anything in the long term, but, if you’re curious: I’m up +16.3% at Wealthfront since opening an account 6 months ago)
Wealthfront gives you the first $ 10,000 (or $ 15,000 with the referral link at the end of this review), free. Any amount over that is 0.25%.
Betterment’s fees work like this:
Under $ 10,000: 0.35%
$ 10,000 to $ 100,000: 0.25%
$ 100,000+: 0.15%
Kind of the opposite.
In summary: Wealthfront is better if you have less than $ 100k, Betterment is better if you have over $ 100k. You can easily move your money between these two with zero fees. When/​if I hit $ 100k, I’m going to consider moving it into Betterment.
What attracted me to Wealthfront in the beginning? Burton Malkiel is their CIO. Who is he? He’s the guy that wrote the book that got me into investing: «A Random Walk Down Wallstreet». He also used to be in charge of Vanguard (a company that Wealthfront and Bettterment buy many of their funds from). Even if you don’t sign up for Wealthfront, I highly recommend the book!
Anyway, here’s the referral link, if you want to try it out: