Betterment Invest & Save Money 4+

Beautiful update!

I love the update and the new logo so much I had to write a review 😍 I’ve been using Betterment for over 4 years for all my investing. I chose Betterment because of its ease of use, it’s automated guidance, and it’s low fees. I don’t know a ton about picking investments myself, and honestly I don’t want to spend my time researching or worrying about my investments. Betterment takes care of all of that for me! I just set up automatic deposits on the date of each paycheck, forget about it for a while, and watch my money grow over time 🤩

The sunrise update made me smile because the new logo is a representation of exactly how I feel about Betterment—the app truly is a part of guiding my life to a brighter future. After all, I am using Betterment to plan for retirement, so I could be using this app for the next 30-40 years!

Thanks, Betterment, for the update and for helping make my life easier and brighter ☀️

Enjoy Betterment service. Could improve on capabilities though.

I really enjoy being a Betterment customer, lots of easy ways to manage money and transfer. Great services. Where I think they fall short is in two places: 1) There is no way to get physical cash into your account. Would love to close my other bank account but still need it to deposit cash then transfer to Betterment. Annoying. 2) When you get a check to deposit there is a very high chance your deposit will fail. This is a development problem on the app. 3 of my checks within the last 6m have simply failed because the app cannot consistently pick up the “For Mobile Deposit Only” text. No matter how clear you write it, spacing, etc, there’s a high probability that the deposit will fail cause the detection is subpar. Developers need to improve this. Annoying. Otherwise, keep making me money. I love the high interest rate savings account and easy ways to save for my kids’ college, but these minor annoyances are what keep me from giving Betterment a higher rating here. The inconveniences simply just get in the way, and I need a banking service that just works, and offers high self service opportunities. When I use them, I want them to work. Cheers!

Lost their way

I’m supremely disappointed that I chose Betterment as my investing platform. I chose Betterment because it seemed they were true to their core mission of helping regular people make smart and risk conscious decisions about their finances and preparing responsibly for their retirement. The tortoise method of winning the race. Their acquisition of Makara and partnership with Gemini are a defection of those core values that initially attracted me. There are plenty of existing places where people can speculate (gamble) with their own money. Betterment should have been better than that. It’s especially disappointing given their change to their fee scheme (which disproportionately impacts younger, smaller, earlier investors. This change adds insult to injury as Betterment is basically charging people more money to lose their money. To date I’ve seen a ~15% unrealized loss across my various buckets. While true that the loss is unrealized, the fees are not. I can lose money all on my own without Betterment’s help. Moreover, there’s no ‘advice’ to speak of, and I’m ineligible for their tax loss harvesting feature. Once the market recovers and I am at a place where I can liquidate my buckets without a 15% haircut, I’m out. Until then I’ll keep investing, but not a moment longer.

Developer Response ,

Hi there, thanks so much for the feedback. I'll pass this along to the appropriate teams for review. Please reach out to our support team at https://www.betterment.com/contact and we would be happy to further assist.