Any advice/opinions for a 26yo new to investment in my situation?

If I were to choose, I will go for ETFs that reinvest the dividends, and ensure the ETFs in IB don't overlap too much with the ones in Stashaway.

Also, I'd like to highlight that IB has a monthly activity fee of USD 10, if you don't have more than USD 100,000 in the account. Another way to frame this cost is if you think that IB fee is like a management fee, then it is relatively low as compared to robo-advisors. More importantly, is to ensure you can keep DCA-ing.

Kyith from Investment Moats wrote an article about it here. You might want to take a look into it.

How Competitive are Interactive Brokers Commissions Pricing? And Also the Monthly Activity Fee

https://investmentmoats.com/money/competitive-i...

And one of his blog followers, lim, commented:

"In HWZ there was another good example of understanding your own financial situation instead of blindly following recommendations on the internet: one investor had just started doing the ‘recommended’ DCA of IWDA using IBKR because on HWZ, “IBKR is the best….”

Later he posted that he had to stop investing for several months because he needed the money for other purposes, and didn’t want to pay IBKR $10 a month., So he sold everything and closed the account. If you are likely to be an ‘irregular’ investor into IWDA or other ETF, SCB might be the best option."

Hope this will give you some insights.​​​

Hello Syth!

It's good that your emergency funds and insurance are all settled. In terms of your investment into your robos, i'd still maintain the monthly dca of $200.

I think it's good to open a IB account because returns on robos will never beat a brokerage trading account due to its hidden fees. If you want to invest in S&P500 etf but trying to avoid the 30% WHT, you can opt for lse-domiciled ones like VUSD/CSPX instead. Liquidity should not be much of an issue esp if you're holding long term, and it's returns are similar to that of VOO. If you believe china will emerge as a larger economic player, esp it's tech sector, CQQQ/KWEB is a good one, but do not allocate too much into it due to volatility. I'd also recommend to dca into IWDA because that's a world etf and gives you diversification.

All the best!