Millennial Finance

With one of the best robo-advisor offerings and high-yield cash accounts, Wealthfront is a no-brainer for Millennials looking to build wealth.

Overall Score: 9/10

Who should download Wealthfront: Anyone looking for one of the best high-yield savings accounts or a top robo-advisor

Pros:

• One of the best high-yield savings account – 2.32%
• Free investment account management up to $5000
• Great app user-experience
• Ability to link all of your financial accounts
• Retirement planning

Cons:

• Charges a .25% fee on investment accounts greater than $5000
• $500 minimum for investment accounts

Full Review:

Among the countless finance and investing apps, Wealthfront is at the front of the pack. Wealthfront is a robo-advisor that also provides advanced retirement planning and forecasting, as well as one of the best high-yield savings accounts. To top it off, your first $5000 is managed for free by using the link at the bottom of the page.

As if all that wasn’t enough, Wealthfront is also an account aggregator. This means you can link all of your accounts, ranging from bank accounts and student loans to even your home value via Redfin. This enables you to get a complete picture of your financial situation and improves the accuracy of Wealthfront’s retirement planning and forecasting capabilities.

Wealthfront is one of the most powerful financial apps available, with even more features set to be release in the near future.

Cost 4.5/5

Wealthfront’s high-yield savings account (referred to as a cash account) is 100% free and can be opened with as little as $1.

When it comes to the investment accounts, Wealthfront charges a .25% annual advisory fee on the account balance and requires a $500 minimum to start investing. Even though it’s still a fee, it’s one of the lowest among the robo-advisor apps and well below the industry average advisory fee. However, this can be avoided by signing up using this link and getting your first $5000 managed completely free.

Ease of Use: 5/5

Wealthfront offers retirement accounts, college-savings accounts, taxable investing accounts and a high-yield savings account. Opening any one of these accounts is very straightforward. With the investing accounts, Wealthfront asks you a series of questions to gauge your risk tolerance and builds your portfolio based on that. There is no need to worry about which stocks or funds to select because Wealthfront handles all of this for you. If you decide you’d like to change your risk tolerance, Wealthfront enables you to do that at any time.

The app is clean and easy to navigate. It lays out all of your accounts by category, so all of your investment accounts are grouped together, assets are grouped together, liabilities, so on and so forth.

Features: 4.5/5

As mentioned earlier, Wealthfront supports an variety of accounts, including retirement, trust and college savings. Since Wealthfront is a robo-advisor, your investments are entirely automated. So all you have to worry about is depositing money and let Wealthfront do the rest. Wealthfront also offers some more advanced features with some of their investment accounts. These include tax-loss harvesting, risk parity for accounts greater than $100k and Smart Beta, a feature that aims to increase your returns by weighting securities in the US stock index more intelligently, for accounts greater than $500k.

In addition to being an investment app, Wealthfront is also an account aggregator. This means you’re able to link all of your accounts, so you can get a complete financial picture. Doing so also enables more accurate retirement planning and forecasting.

Related to retirement planning, one of the cool features Wealthfront offers is net worth projections so you can determine when the optimal time for you to retire is. What really makes this offering unique, is Wealthfront enables you to input “what-if” scenarios and see how that impacts your retirement timeline. So if you plan on purchasing a house in a few years, you can plug this in, and Wealthfront will calculate the impact it will have on your retirement.

Arguably, the best feature Wealthfront offers is a cash account (aka savings account) that offers an astonishing 2.32% APY. This is one of the best savings rates you can find, and is a great reason to give Wealthfront a try. If you use Wealthfront for nothing else, the high-yield savings account is definitely worth it. On top of that, Wealthfront offers up to $1 million in FDIC coverage, 4x more than banks are able to offer.

Lastly, the big question surrounding robo-advisors is how good are they? Which robo-advisor is the best, and could I get better returns by investing in an index fund? In the second quarter of 2019, my Wealthfront IRA account returned 1.86% vs. the S&P 500 Index that returned 3.06%. The IRA account is an aggressive growth strategy with a risk score of 9.5/10, so it experiences more dramatic swings than an account with a lower risk score. That being said, one quarter is a short period of time, so look for our follow-up review to see how Wealthfront’s robo-advisor performance stacks up.

Summary

Wealthfront is one of the best fintech apps, primarily if you’re looking for one of the best high-yield savings accounts with no strings attached – one that doesn’t require you to sign up for a checking account (ahem, Betterment). On top of that, the free $5000 worth of investments are a great add-on for anyone looking to open an IRA or other investment account and wants to give robo-advising a go. Wealthfront is one of the best, if not the best, robo-advisor and account aggregator apps that everyone should consider.