Acorns Personal Finance Tools Review

Breadth of Services

Acorns provides an intriguing combination of features for its users. It functions as a banking resource, an investment advisor, a retirement savings plan, and a portfolio management service. It’s perhaps best known for helping customers who are new to investing a way to get their feet wet. Acorns makes automatic small investments for you in a pre-selected group of stocks and bonds which constitute a diversified portfolio. Investment diversification is a strategy employed to lower an investor’s overall risk. Acorns users narrow their investments by choosing among five portfolio-building strategies which correlate to their risk tolerance. For users who prefer to a hands-off approach to investing, Acorns is a great solution.

Screenshot from Acorns.com, August 2020

The Acorns app uses a “rounding up” strategy to extract money from your account each time you make a debit card purchase. If you use your Acorns debit card to make a purchase for $53.63, for example, Acorns will round your purchase up to $54.00 and invest $.37 for you. The company’s website states that the average Acorns account holder invests $30 per month this way. Pretty painless. However, you can always opt to invest larger amounts than the round-up strategy reaps.

When you use a debit card that you’ve linked to your Acorns account, you can also take advantage of cash-back opportunities with approximately 100 brands and retailers, including Nike, Sephora, Macy’s, and Walmart. That’s another easy way to fund your Acorns investment portfolio.

Pricing

It’s hard to beat Acorns pricing. Users pay between one and five dollars per month to gain access to the broad range of services the company provides. Each plan works via Acorns’ no-fee checking account. For just one dollar, Acorns’ Lite plan helps you invest automatically through rounding up. Acorns’ Personal plan, at three dollars per month is an all-in-one checking, debit, investment, and retirement savings service. Personal plan users have access to financial advice and bonus investment opportunities.  

Acorns’ family plan is a unique option available for five dollars per month. Under this plan, parents can set up individual savings plans for each child in their households. Early savings on children’s behalf can help ensure that college tuition money is there when you need it, for example. Many children grow up without learning much of anything about finances and find themselves at a disadvantage later in life. Money is a tough subject for families to talk about. With Acorns’ family plan, you can introduce your kids to concepts like saving, budgeting, and investing at an early age, when these ideas are likely to “stick,” thereby setting kids up for a lifetime of good financial habits.

We do want to mention one caveat concerning Acorns’ pricing structure. Since many people use the app to invest small amounts, the subscription fee Acorns charges may represent a disproportionately large share of your actual investment until such time as your build up a significant balance. We certainly don’t think that’s a deal breaker but it is something new users should be aware of.

Educational Resources

Acorns provides an impressive library of financial education resources. The company partners with CNBC to curate timely articles on a very wide range of subjects, from job-hunting and managing the economic effects of the global pandemic to raising your credit score and refinancing your mortgage. These articles are well-organized into five categories to help users find the information they’re looking for: saving, spending, earning, investing, and borrowing. Articles are written in a very approachable tone, making them accessible even to readers with limited financial chops.

Customer Experience

Acorns makes it easy to learn about its services on its well-organized website. We appreciated the fact that the company makes its educational materials accessible to visitors regardless of whether they are account holders. Their pricing policies are also clearly explained and easy to find on the site.

Within the app itself, Acorns offers a series of well-deigned, easy-to-grasp screens to help customers transact business, including saving, spending, transferring funds out of the app, and investing. Other screens allow customers track their investment earnings and fully understand where their money is being invested.

Acorns isn’t specific about the security protocols it uses to protect customers’ private information but instead states its practices conform to industry norms. The company’s privacy policy does indicate with whom and why it may share users’ contact information and states that occasionally your information will be shared with non-affiliated organizations who may try to market their products for you. 

Reputation

Acorns earns praise in the press for being an excellent resource for small and beginning investors. The app earns 4 out of 5 stars at the Apple Store and 4.5 out of 5 stars from Google Play users. Those high ratings, however, are balanced by the app’s rather dismal D- rating by the BBB.  Customer complaints reported by the BBB mostly centered around problems with the app locking account holders out and taking unacceptable amounts of time to transfer and release funds. To its credit, Acorns does respond diligently to complaints registered and many users have been satisfied with how Acorns resolves disputes.

Acorns Summed Up

Acorns is one of the easiest ways for beginning and small investors to reap the benefits of investing in the stock market while also maintaining a clear vision of their finances in totality. Its innovative use of an automatic roundup strategy, which has since been adopted by personal finance apps, makes investing painless. Moreover, the suite of services the app provides for a very modest fee make Acorns a great choice for both everyday financial activity and long-term planning.