I LOVE my Acorns account.  I am not being paid to say this (although… if anyone from Acorns is reading this…).  I am constantly trying to get my friends and kids in my classes to start using Acorns and begin investing with ease.

Two years ago, I was a senior in high school with a job at my local movie theater and lots of expendable income that was being funneled into clothes and junk food.  After a lesson on investing in my statistics class, I started looking for a simple way to invest.  Acorns was the only app I found with easy accessibility and was free while I was a student.

Features

Acorns is a great investing app for your 20’s because it is almost all mobile and focuses on small and consistent investments. You can set up recurring investments or round ups. Round-ups is a feature where Acorns tracks your spending and will “round up” each purchase to the nearest dollar and invest that amount once it reaches 5 dollars.  For example, If you spend $3.78 on coffee with your debit card, Acorns will track that and put .22 cents in your account from your bank account.  Although this might sound small, I’ve had over 400$ automatically invested from round ups in the past 2 years.  This is a great tool, because it forces you to invest more if you start spending more.

Photo by Steve Johnson

Recently, Acorns unveiled Acorns Later which is a retirement account managed by Acorns. They help you decide whether you should start a Roth, Traditional, or SEP IRA. These accounts are great because they have low fees and offer tax advantages over a regular investment account.

One thing to watch out for…

If you are not a student, and are therefore not eligible for Acorns for free, then there is a flat $1 monthly fee if you have under $5,000.  This could be expensive depending on how much money you are investing.  For example, if you only invest $20 a month, then that is a 5% fee.  On average, you want to be making more using Acorns than you spend on it. If you can’t spare about $50 a month on average, then I would recommend looking into other sites with free introductory rates. For accounts over $5,000, there is only a .25% fee which is a great rate for ETF’s.