Investing App Round Up

Ok, so you’ve decided to invest — that’s great! The next question should be, where? What broker should you use? And if you’re like me, you’re addicted to your phone and the first place you’d start to invest would be from the comforts of the throne, er, I mean, the couch. Right, the couch.

With that in mind, I thought I’d go ahead and give a little tour of the different “new” brokerages that are primarily app-focused. Specifically, Robinhood, Acorns, and Stockpile. Then I’m going to compare these new comers against some old stalwarts of the brokerage world: Fidelity and Vanguard.

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How I Got Started in Investing: Picking Stocks at 14

I think it’s always fun to look back and think about our past–after all, the past is what got us to where we are today. I thought I’d share with you the very first investment I made: Handspring, Inc.

Now, you may not remember this little company, but they were a blip on the radar of the early oughts — in an era where the Palm Pilot ruled, they were a spin-off company. As a young teenager, I saw a blue Handspring Visor, their first product, and had to get one for my 14th birthday.

I loved their product and so I thought, I’m going to invest in this company: they’re going to be huge someday. And I so did. Unfortunately, they did not. But let’s back up a little further…

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How we automate our life: Retirement

Photo by Simon Migaj from Pexels

In this blog post, I’m going to continue our discussions of how to automate your life — with the goal of reducing mental complexity and making your life more free. In this post, I’d like to share how we automate our retirements.

As I said before, you make the decision to save for retirement once, so why relive that decision month after month when you carry out your plan?

Make the decision once and take action once. Pure and simple.

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Fidelity Introduces Zero Expense Ratios

Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash

In a first for mutual funds, Fidelity Investments announced that they have introduced two index mutual funds that have a zero expense ratio — FZROX (Fidelity ZERO Total Market Index Fund) and FZILX (Fidelity ZERO International Index Fund).

Of course, since these are both brand new funds, they do not have any history to go on as to how well they are faring on the market, however, the ability of Fidelity to offer such funds is a huge shot-across-the-bow in terms of pushing others to offer similar funds, especially Vanguard.

But for those of us who follow a Bogleheads’ philosophy of going for index funds and keeping costs low, going from a low-cost fund with an expense ratio of 0.2-0.5%, for instance, will this be a huge benefit over the long term?

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