Anyone using Acorns Investment or a similar platform to invest their spare change?

This was the reason how I started investing in the first place! I used it when I was studying/working in the US. One thing that I really loved was its UI and ease of use. It's mobile-first so you can do everything on your phone.

Acorns basically link up with your bank's checking account (compatible across many major banks) and track your expenses. It then rounds up your expenses to the nearest dollar and uses that difference and saves it as 'spare change'. Once your 'spare change' accumulates to $5,

E.g. let's say you bought kaya toast for $0.70 and charged it to your debit card. Acorns round up the transaction to the nearest dollar and stores the difference of $0.30. Once all of these 'round-ups' accumulate to $5, Acorns will then transfer money from your funding source to your Acorns Invest account, which is a robo advisor that helps you invest in a portfolio of ETFs, which varies depending on your risk profile. All of this spare change rounding up is done automatically. Or you can decide to invest manually.

You can even boost your growth with a round-up multiplier like 2x, 3x, 10x

Over the years, I've made over 377 transactions then and I've used the round-up feature to invest about $232 worth without any multipliers. You can see how little round-ups can add up.

Aside from the round-ups, you can also set a recurring investment from your funding source, daily, weekly and monthly. You can even decide which day of the week/month you want Acorns to auto deduct from your funding source to invest. e.g. If I want to invest $20 every day for the rest of the month and Acorns will simply charge your funding source for it every single day, automatically. This is a feature that I really miss and I feel that is severely lacking here in SG's robo advisories. I used this feature way more than round-ups.

On portfolios, there are 5 different kinds, from conservative to moderate and aggressive. Each with a different allocation to equity ETFs, govt and corp bonds. I was on the aggressive portfolio which consists of the following.

• 40% in VOO

• 20% in VB

• 10% in VWO

• 10% in VNQ

• 20% in VEA

I did not use the other features like Acorns Spend, Found Money, or even Acorns Later where you can invest for retirement, which wasn't what I needed then. Found Money is similar to ShopBack here in SG where instead of getting cashback, partnered businesses with Acorns will funnel a fraction of your spendings to your Invest account instead. From what I gathered, they're partnered with a wide range of businesses.

On fees: I signed up for a student account and did not have to pay a fee for 5 years. But this policy has changed and it's $1 a month flat fee for just their basic account, regardless of your portfolio size.

Overall I will say that Acorns is a neat automatic way to help you save money as you spend; Acts as a roboadvisor that helps you invest, rebalance your portfolio; Has a nice ecosystem where you can shop and get invested, has a debit card that you can use to further track your expenses. Too bad it's not available here otherwise I'll highly recommend this platform.​​​

Hey Ryan!
We actually saw this Acorns model before and also considered creating something like this for the Singapore/SEA market.
However, what we found was that the numbers were not that meaningful as the spare change idea may work in the west but not here.

I think the closest thing we have to this in this part of the world are robo-advisors.

Which right now there are close to 5 or 6 in the market, where you start with at least $100. (which is a really low requirement to begin with)
The backbone of Acorns and Robo advisors in this space are the same thing, if i am not wrong, market traded ETFs which track indexes around the world.

You can find all the Robo Advisors and read their reviews here: https://seedly.sg/reviews/robo-advisors

In Singapore, here is the process for signing up to invest with a Robo Advisor:

• First, the robo advisor will collect information from the investor to understand the risk appetite, investment time horizon, future goals and financial situation that the investor is in.
• Once the above is done, investor will be assigned one of the robo advisor's portfolio that best suits the investor.
• The investor can then fund the account. This can be done either through a lump sum or monthly option.
• The robo advisor will then monitor the market, rebalance the portfolio if need be.

As most of these are done with the help of algorithm, investors cannot actively choose to allocate their investment different from the fixed portfolio provided.

Currently there are a few major Robo-advisors in Singapore.

They are mainly:

• StashAway
• AutoWealth
• Smartly
• Phillip SMART Portfolio
• FSMOne Maps
• MoneyOwl
• Syfe