how to Use Acorns App - Investing For Beginners

one of the easiest way to invest is with an app called acorns where it basically lets you invest your change and it lets you invest for retirement very simply without you thinking about it all the time and you could also earn while you shop using this app too so if you're looking to invest your money this is one of the best ways to do it because it makes it really easy so in this video i want to walk you through exactly how to do it now originally i made a video two years ago on this exact app when i first set it up so i'll link that below if you need some more guidance on the setup process this is going to be how to use a process in the things inside of the app the setup process is pretty straightforward as far as the information it needs to get started and i do have a referral

link in the description below that will basically give you five dollars once you go through the whole sign up process so if you don't have acorns yet and you want the referral code make sure you sign on with that and then you could always share your referral code with other people too once you log in so let's go through the setup process this is the home page this is basically a one pager app almost everything you need is right here the first thing i recommend you do once you set up your accounts is press this option invest in your future and then it will bring you to this page and your value here will be zero again i've been using that for a couple years to invest my spare change here and a couple of things you could do the first one is roundups that's where it rounds up all your transactions to the nearest dollar and invests the change next time is one time recurring so you could decide maybe 25 on the first of each month is getting invested which is something i'm doing i'll show you that then you could obviously withdraw your money too when you want to take it out so let's start with this one roundups and you could see even when i'm paying my electric bill here it rounded up to the nearest dollar so that was 38 cents invested so these are all my different bills and if i go through these i'm just blurring these out some of these are personal but basically it's rounding up everything every transaction i make with a card that is linked and you could click the settings option here because you do have some options here as far as how it works so you could set it to be automatic you could add a multiplier so it would just maybe double or triple the roundup so if you want to save even faster this is one way to do it and down here i unlinked my account because i want to show you how to link a card you could click this option here and here you could go ahead and link a checking account you could link a debit card for example and if you don't have anything just press link an account down here and it's going to give you access where you could search for your bank here or number of other ways to use any of these options so if you have for example bank of america you could click here and then it will ask you to log into your bank of america with the secure and private option and it will then ask you your username and your password of your bank so that's how you link an account from this page then once that's set make sure you allow transfers to appear here and you could link multiple accounts just doesn't have to be one account once you're happy and you have everything set up here go ahead and press save down here and that's how roundup works and it's going to show you your roundup settings right here in the middle of the page i'll talk to you about portfolio in a second but right now let's also look at the one-time payment now with the one-time it's a one-time investment that will process in one to three business days so you could choose an amount that you want to invest so 25 for example and then you could just press invest on the bottom of the page when you choose that amount and that's a one-time investment and i just set up that 25 another option you have is this recurring option let me go here to the recurring option i really like this because this is one way i don't have to think about it so if you have the change where it does the roundup change plus this plus the multiplier on the round-up change you're going to save a lot faster so you would set your amount here any number you want to put in here minimum is five dollars and then on here it says first of each month but you could basically make this daily even if you want to so every day maybe you want to do five bucks instead of spending that five dollars somewhere else or weekly i like the first of the month here as an option so far i recommend you turn on roundups add at least one debit card to that or a checking account if you want to do a one-time payment to have some initial value here you could do that and it will transfer that in one to two business days and the recurring option you could set up here so every month or every week whatever you choose is set up so those are the basics of getting started with this app right here and then you could decide the type of investments you make so let me kind of explain this to you and the one thing that's really great

about that is if you have no idea about investing in the stock market or in bonds or in index funds this is going to walk you through some of those settings in a very clear way so let me show you a few of those now mine is set to moderately aggressive i'll click this option right here and basically there there's a few different ways you could invest with this so let me scroll down just to show you the different this is based on your risk tolerance so let me go up here and press the first option so the conservative is the lowest risk right because if you go all the way to the other side and choose this one the aggressive you're risking a lot more because you're mostly investing in u. s stock market and the large company stocks here now with company stocks like that there are times in maybe a course of a decade where one or two times the stock market can crash over 50 percent and you will lose a significant portion of your saving but in the long run typically the stock market does return eight to ten percent per year on average so just to show you the different ones you have under the conservative you could see how they're going to allocate all your investments so your recurring investment your spare change investment this is going to go 20 into basically bonds right this is basically the most conservative you could get with your portfolio here your portfolio is basically this your collection of investments then i'll go to the second one here moderately conservative so this one is going to have a little bit of stock but it's still very heavy on the bonds so over 50 percent between these two here short term us bonds and u. s aggregate bonds so you could see that here then let's go in the middle of the moderate this one you have a lot more large company stocks and then the rest you could see even international company stocks are included here on moderately aggressive you could see this mostly large company stocks and if you get very aggressive you got mostly large company stocks now to figure out what exactly this 55 is let me go back one page and based on my selection here you could see mine is set to 47 company stocks well what are those exactly i could click this arrow here and it's going to show me right here exactly what my holdings are so apple microsoft amazon facebook google berkshire hathaway jpmorgan those are tesla those are some of the stocks that are in my portfolio right now and it's basically a bundle it's kind of like an index a bundle of all those stocks in one and i could see my return here so that portion has returned me forty percent in the course of using this app in one year and i could actually break it down by six months for example and see fifteen point five nine percent in the course of six months now that's a lot higher than usual but the stock market as i'm making this has been a lot higher than previous years here and it tells you up here you're basically buying vo which is a etf and it gives you exposure to the 500 largest u. s companies so that gives you a good explanation you could read about any of those based on whatever risk tolerance you choose so i could even go to the small cap here and see what companies those holdings are now you can't change these okay this is not by picking individual stocks the app is taken care of for you all you can change is your risk tolerance if you want to pick individual stocks and invest that way you should use another app like robinhood for example where you could choose exactly what you're buying here you're basically letting the app take care of most of that for you

now since i made the original video a couple years ago i do have some history with this app so i could actually show you one of my favorite pages in the app i'll go back to the home page of the app and on this home page once you set up your investing for the future there's this little icon right here press this and this is really great because it's going to show you just based on your current investment for me which is not very much i think i only invested like 35 last month but it says hypothetically i'll get to 75 000 by 77 but i could grab this right here and bring it back so maybe i want to retire 65 i could see i could get 34 000 by then so obviously this is not my only investment because this is not going to be enough to retire on and i will have to invest a lot more and i usually invest with other platforms but this is a good kind of a secondary option for just doing something that i'm not thinking about every day in fact i rarely open this app and the investment does keep going up over time and another thing i really like let me click right here and on this page where we set up our investments if i go down it's going to show your history here over time so let me expand this out to kind of explain to you what's going on this is showing me my all time since couple years ago of getting this app i gained 571 dollars using this app so i invested closer to 2100 with my spare change i'm recurring and he added another 571 in a couple years now this is unusually a high return you shouldn't expect to get this kind of return especially let me go to the one year tab here yeah you could see 25 in just one year that's very unusual typically the stock market even with an aggressive portfolio is eight to ten percent on average so this is nice because you could basically click on six months three months and see how you did and this is your portfolio but if you press the arrow here you could see how the stock market actually did so you could compare your return versus the stock market return and mine is basically exactly the same right because i pick a more aggressive that follows more the stock market and less bonds and i could see a full account breakdown and see where all my money came from so the stock market did unusually well here so obviously most of the returns came from there but you could also see where they came from besides that like bonds or international stocks too and on the previous page too you could see that i also make money on dividend stocks

stocks so some companies like apple and at t just for holding them pay you sometimes quarterly like four times a year or sometimes yearly they pay you a dividend now that could be low like apple is closer to one percent at t when i was holding last i checked was closer to six seven percent and that's how much you earn by just holding those stocks and just because of the bundle of stocks and the investments i have here i also get that dividend stocks which then gets redistributed back into my portfolio and gets invested again so that's one way to really compound how much money you could make is by these dividend stocks again not something i chose it's just in my portfolio by default but besides the one-time investment besides the roundups i also get these dividends over here too and the last thing i'll show you that i really found useful is you could also earn money here by just using this app as a shopping app so let's say i wanted to buy a new iphone so i'll just click on apple here it says if you tap shop now here and complete the transaction in one session you get 1. 5 percent from that transaction invested into your investment account so if i press shop now for example it's gonna just go ahead and open up apple the website and let's say i wanted to buy something so if i just press buy here and bought this item right here i could get one and a half percent of that which is kind of significant on more expensive items like this but obviously apple is not the only one you could literally do this for burger king and have maybe a company like grubhub bring this to your house for example right so a lot of different options but this is kind of useful if you're going to buy from these companies anyway it's nice to get sometimes four or five percent cash back just by using this app and then taking care of the transaction through here and they do have other options that i haven't used myself but you could go ahead and check out some of these on your own for example they could let you save for your kids here and they do have a whole knowledge base if you're new to investing like how much you should invest and how you could get investment advice they're all over here obviously i'm not a financial advisor and i just review apps but this does give you a good look into how these things work and i should show you one last thing because this app is not completely free it feels like it's free because your investment kind of paid for the platform but let me go to settings if i press my profile icon and go to the settings option here there's an option here it says my subscription let me click on that and by default you are on the light here which is only a dollar a month so i don't typically even notice that this is happening but they do have other subscriptions let me press manage here so the light option is what i have so it lets me invest my spare change it lets me earn bonuses from investments and get that financial tips here that i showed you but you also have a personal option that gives you a little bit more here like it has a money management system here all in one investments retirement checking accounts so if you want that you could upgrade here and they have a family plan as well here that's five dollars a month at the time i'm recording this but you can cancel at any time you like on the bottom but again it's not very much especially since this app has made me hundreds of dollars just in the last couple years from my investments for investing very little each month i'm going to give this app a solid 5 out of 5. especially if you're new to investing this makes it so easy again not financial advice but i am a fan of this app and i think it could be beneficial to you but give it a spin see if you like it you could cancel at any time thanks so much for watching this video make sure you subscribe for easy to follow app review videos just like this one and i hope to catch you next time