Acorns Is A Micro-Investment App That Does All The Thinking For You

Investing for the future can be hard for a twenty-something. With restrictions like minimum account balances and commission fees that make it uneconomical to invest a few hundred bucks at a time, investing can almost feel impossible.

Until today. Acorns is officially launching on the App Store to help anyone invest right from their smartphone.

Acorns works by letting you connect your credit or debit cards (with a simple sign-up using your online bank credentials), and automatically rounds up the change from every purchase to add to your investment portfolio. You can choose between five different risk options, from aggressive to conservative, and watch how your investments are performing over time.

At any time, you can make a deposit into your investment account and/or switch around the risk profile of your portfolio to be more or less aggressive. All of the five different portfolios are compiled by a team of investment analysts, mathematicians, and economists. Users also have the option to take money out of their investment portfolio whenever they need it.

Because Acorns is connected to your actual bank account, it has the ability to look for cash rebates from banks and can also be integrated with loyalty programs to invest the value from those accounts.

You can also go through and manually add every “round up” to your investment portfolio if you wish to monitor how much you’re putting into your portfolio. For those who don’t care to follow along, there is a default setting that will automatically invest on your behalf.

Acorns makes money by charging a monthly $1 fee for every active investment month, as well as a management fee that ranges from .5 percent to .25 percent, depending on how much you’re investing.

In the 10 weeks that the company has been in beta, it has acquired around 10,000 users who are investing in the platform. On average, users are investing around $3/day in roundups alone, and portfolios have expected returns ranging from four to nine percent annually.

Acorns has raised a total of $8.3 million, with their $6.2 million Series B closing in March.

Comments

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document? That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the document

Clip & Convert Your Video Faster With Quicktime X & The New Handbrake 64-bit [Mac]

Recently a friend of mine asked for my help to find a video of a good presentation to be shown to one of his classes. He also requested for it to be iPod friendly as he would also distribute the video to his students. Three things came to my mind: Steve Jobs, Quicktime and Handbrake . Mr. Jobs is well known for his great presentations which are often used as references. I have several Apple Keynotes videos. For my friend, I decided to choose the one that introduced MacBook Air – the one that never fails to deliver the wow effect to the non-techie audience. It’s a part of January 2008 Macworld Keynote. First step: The Cutting To get only a specific part of the Keynote, I clipped the 1+ hour video into about 20 minutes using Quicktime X (which comes with Snow Leopard). I opened the movie using Quicktime X and chose Trim from the Edit menu ( Command + T ). Then I chose the start and end of my clip by moving both edges of the trimming bar to the desired position. To increase th

Ex-Skypers Launch Virtual Whiteboard Deekit

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a

Kiran Upadhyay

Search This Blog