Betterment Invest & Save Money Reviews

by Kylej7

This is a rating for BettermentInvestSaveMoney , not betterment as an investment tool.

The combination of password requirements and frequent clearing of saved passwords for n BettermentInvestSaveMoney is extremely frustrating. The required password complexity is so extreme that I can never remember whatever I had to come up with to access my account. This isn’t a problem in an actual computer and a browser to save these passwords. However, the Betterment app consistently clears the saved password in BettermentInvestSaveMoney on an almost monthly basis. This means that almost every time I go to my app to check how things are going I am forced to reset my password...again. This only further compounds the “have to come up with a really non-rememberable combination of characters for this password” problem.

I love Betterment, but I HATE trying to use BettermentInvestSaveMoney to monitor my account.

by Hjn7076

I have been using betterment for a while now and was sort of happy. Funds performed decent with some gains- thank you for that.
What is beyond annoying is how bad BettermentInvestSaveMoney experience has become. It went from easy to use and clear info to the worst interface I have seen in a long while. Intuitive handling is down the drain - it takes WAY TOO MANY steps to drill down to the info that is important. And even then you can’t find useful information, intuitive tools, advice tidbit. And even than it’s not clear what actually is going on. The graphs are ridiculous - useless.

I’m using betterment 90% of the time on my iPhone - and even when going to the actual website it’s terrible what has become out of this “cool” app. It’s disgusting to see yet another corporate “adjustment” taking away the user experience.

I’m ready to move on and transfer all my funds to sites that give you an experience and entice you to “observe” your fund. It’s important to feel the love from your app - or you become as exciting as it is to read a phonebook. I know I’m a small fish and nobody cares about my tiny account- but mind you where your roots were when you cared about the end user!

Writing a review is a very rare thing of me to do - and it must be really bad if I do so.

I have the patience to see one more “upgrade” on BettermentInvestSaveMoney Store- and if not changing I will be ready to put my money somewhere else- even if it might not grow noticeable.

Fix this thing!

by I'm A Stalker K?

Was going to start up my Roth IRA with betterment. Just turned 18 and two days after I decided it was time to open a Roth IRA. Betterment was well rated so I got BettermentInvestSaveMoney and did all the setup. After tons of questions which is expected, I was given tons more and then told my I’d couldn’t be verified. I already have a credit card at this point and hundreds of dollars in stock so why was this a problem now? Anyway I went through and provided pictures of my ID to verify my identity. Had to wait two days it said. So whatever I wait and wait and nothing. I eventually get an email saying I need addition verification like I hadn’t already sent it. Anyways I’m deleting BettermentInvestSaveMoney now as I found another app willing to accept my account with no further un necessary verification. If I am going to own an account for 50 years then it better be with a company I can trust and a company that won’t question my moves and identity. I’m not gonna put my money into an app that won’t accept me. Don’t get it

by Ang9418

Updated 10/24:
They are now adding smart saver accounts to “existing personal accounts,” which is apparently not legally a separate account but regardless pretty invasive if you ask me. I have lost 5.7% with betterment over the last year. Would not recommend to anybody.

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I think it’s a great concept and BettermentInvestSaveMoney functions fairly well, however they do market themselves as investing for everyone and the customer service does not reflect that at all. I sent in my feedback that maybe the time weighted returns should not be a positive percentage/limited to zero if an account has lost money overall. (So far, I have negative returns using Betterment.) I understand the math, but you know, if your service is stated as something for all people and not only investing experts, your service reps shouldn’t admonish a user for suggesting a change to this return thing that might make people like myself feel a little less like a gullible idiot for investing in your “friendly” service. I’m just saying, investing for everyone should not involve being low grade mocked for thinking a modification to an algorithm might help people like me, who are the non-expert part of “everyone” these hooligans claim to care about. I’d give them a triple fart minus if I could. I wish I got that jerk’s name.

by Nick17486382

I created a checking and savings account so i could evaluate their interface. I transferred 25k into savings and tried to fund some of that into their checking. I decided i wasn’t a huge fan of their interface so I would transfer my money back out and close my accounts. It’s been 8 days and my money still hasn’t gone from my savings into my external account, but it *still* also hasn’t transferred into my betterment checking. How could it take 8 days to transfer from a savings account to a checking account within the same company? That means they’re either incompetent or holding onto my money inappropriately. My balance shows as 0 yet there’s no money in my betterment checking, betterment savings, or the external account that i tried to transfer money back into. Stay away from their banking if you want to have access to your money

by Plaintiger

Either my account didn't take forever to get verified and opened, or it did and it didn't bother me and I've forgotten about it – not sure which. But my account was opened probably a month and a half ago and because of their fees, has consistently lost money (I only had a small amount of money in there; on the one hand, maybe if I had more my balance would've increased rather than decreased, but on the other hand, they charge a percentage, which would have gone up along with my investment account balance, so maybe there's just no way to make money with Betterment. Don't know.). For people having a hard time with the interface, the UI of their website is still a little wonky and difficult to figure out, but probably not as bad as BettermentInvestSaveMoney and I've managed to more or less find my way around. Anyway, with Betterment charging fees (which my TD Ameritrade account does not) and consistently losing me money, I've decided to withdraw my funds and close my account. Now I'm just hoping the withdrawal goes a lot more smoothly than it seems to have for many of the reviewers here!

by Mikey7140

Betterment’s app and online presentation has some major shortfalls when compared to a Wealthfront. Betterment’s design makes it hard for users to understand the value of their different investments. It inexplicably combines various accounts under one goal (for example all of your retirement accounts are combined under one number). Doing this makes it hard to track returns, contributions, or other activities on individual accounts. Finally, their projections only update properly when you have recurring investments, essentially forcing you to make recurring contributions to get functionality. This doesn’t support non-traditional income streams and is a huge miss. Overall just not as user friendly as Wealthfront.

Unrelated to BettermentInvestSaveMoney , I’m pretty disappointed with my investment performance and believe the Tax-Loss Harvesting feature is far inferior to Wealthfront as well.

by Abcbcd

I don’t understand why after so many years of using BettermentInvestSaveMoney it’s still impossible to do basic things, like linking an account, without going to either the awful mobile website or using a desktop. I never use anything other than BettermentInvestSaveMoney , and have no desire to, but i keep being forced to dig through the menus of the awful mobile site when accounts stop updating. Stop moving everything around every month and add the basic features BettermentInvestSaveMoney needs. I do 99% of my baking and finance stuff on my phone, and compared to other finance apps this one is the worst.

The platform itself is also quite limited at tracking external assets. You can’t track individual stocks, like in personal capital, so if you own stocks and you’re trying to use Betterment for a net worth dashboard, give up and use personal capital instead.

by Tellyourmomisayhi

I'm an avid investor and I love the idea of having a robo-advisor in addition to my other accounts. I just hate how some features aren't as practical as they should be for a web/app based program. I can only link one bank account at a time for auto transfers?! That's crazy to me. I have like 4 different bank/brokerage accounts on rotation. Another thing is I can't see the account number for the bank account that I have linked. That's also annoying considering I have two accounts with that bank, so I always forget which account is linked because I have to change it every time I want to switch accounts. I'm thinking of moving all my money from my betterment account and just buying ETFs in my taxable brokerage account with someone else to save myself the hassle and inconvenience. :/

by PitPerfect

Logging in with FaceID it says session expired with Dismiss as the only option. When the user selects dismiss BettermentInvestSaveMoney attempts FaceID again with the same results (session has expired). The user cannot log out of BettermentInvestSaveMoney . So now the user must uninstall/reinstall BettermentInvestSaveMoney . For any company, accident or not, to cause a user to uninstall and reinstall an app because of a lazy deployment team is completely unacceptable especially when that business is either a financial or security company. If this can slip through Betterment’s engineering checks what else is?

The only reason I use BettermentInvestSaveMoney is because my account is still empty-open. And your fees, really? I’m no Einstein but my non-robo-advised account perform better during the year I had your service.

I will say though, if you just want to “set it and forget it” with automatic deposits purchasing a limited number of ETFs (might be more now) and paying a small fee every 6-months (I believe) then this is your investment service.

All other fin products (mmsa, etc) are pointless right now with the Feds sitting on such low rates.

Beware. There are better options out there for active investors.

by Javsa 007

I have been with betterment for a few years and it feels that BettermentInvestSaveMoney keeps getting worse and lacks information. Used to be able to see the allocation of the money within the different funds and now i cannot see that. Another feature that i like was the daily change in the history (they removed this a while back). Another thing is that i am not sure how good their allocation algorithm is because i have been beating their returns year after year by double digits.

*edit after developer response* i added a star because i was able to follow the instructions from the staff to be able to find the fund allocations. I was going to close my account if that information was not available but i will keep it because that information is critical to me. Thanks for your response.

by Darthbiggs18

I love the simplicity of banking with Betterment and being able to invest my savings in a number of ways. But when it comes to making those big purchases that I’ve been saving and investing towards, Betterment falls short. I’m currently saving to put a down payment on a house. But when time comes to place that down payment I’ll most likely have to transfer those funds to another bank so I can get a cashiers check from them to make the payment. Huge headache! I want to be able to get a cashiers check straight from betterment so I don’t have to go through another bank! If cashiers checks ever become available this will change to 5 stars.

by Longdistance45

I am a huge fan of the company and how they operate. An automated ETF solution that allows me to get broad exposure and control my allocation to stocks and bonds if I feel comfortable is wonderful. However, as others have stated, BettermentInvestSaveMoney is generally frustrating. They should take some lessons from Vanguard and try to incorporate some of their functionality and summaries such as: tables that lay out how much each account as made, principal infested for each account, cost basis, dividends received, etc... Then, on a performance tab, show a graph that breaks out principal and returns so people can see what they have actually made. Then have a table that shows investment returns vs income returns for each month. I love Vanguard’s app if you can’t tell and think they are phenomenal, but I like Betterment’s investment platform for consistent investing over time. Hopefully BettermentInvestSaveMoney gets better and they focus on facts and functionality.

by Mg4369

My work 401k account doesn’t connect to Betterment so I added it manually. I’d love to be able to make manual updates to my 401k (and add other accounts) from BettermentInvestSaveMoney instead of logging into my account from the web on my phone, making the updates, and then switching back to BettermentInvestSaveMoney . Just feels clunky switching from BettermentInvestSaveMoney to the web and back to my app again. It would also be nice to better understand why the minimum investment amount is $10. I like to do small increment actions everyday ($5 to savings account, $5 to credit card debt, etc). I wanted to do a $5 deposit to my betterment account, but then realized I couldn’t add less than 10 bucks. Maybe just a short blurb on the deposit page about why $10 is the minimum would be helpful. Or if possible, taking away the minimum deposit amount all together. Thank you for considering this feedback and for the great app. :)

by Shaneee_Lewis

I’ve hopped back and forth between different personal finance applications for checking, savings, and investments in the past few years and Betterment has just come out top-tier when it comes navigation, resources, usability, and overall user experience.

Their app is simple and easy to use, showing you everything you need-to-know in a single screen.

At a glance I can check how my paychecks are being directly deposited into my checking account, some of my money being auto-deposited into my savings, and how my 401(k), Roth IRA, and General Investing accounts are generating revenue without me touching a button!

by Marko Jurac

Have been a Betterment customer for almost two years now. I've only been using their "Cash Reserve" and "Invest and Retire" products.

They primarily offer Vanguard funds in their allocation mixes, which everyone knows offers the best value with their low fund expense ratios and great fund management and asset diversification.

Another great value over other robo-advisors is their "Tax Loss Harvesting" product, which basically sells any underperforming assets to generate beneficial tax events. This alone gained me a roughly $1500 deduction on my 2020 tax return. Kudos Betterment. They also offer automatic rebalancing to maintain a desired risk level.

The overall UI is very clean and modern. Mobile app still needs work as the web version on desktop/mobile are much more fully featured.

Others should note: Vanguard recently released their "Vanguard Digital Advisor" product which offers a management fee of 15 basis points (0.15%) over Betterment's (0.25%) management fee. So you could essentially cut out the middle man by going with them.

Overall, still a great robo-advisor for 2021. I look forward to continuing my business with Betterment.

by Ursokj

Betterment makes it easy to save for retirement or any other goal. The individual goals you can create are really nice to see how much you have saved towards each one instead of just having one large pot of money. The iOS app is super simple to use and makes depositing money or seeing performance easy.

I have not had an account long enough to really compare the returns to other investments. They recently added a much simpler view to see your annualized returns vs benchmarks on the website which should make comparisons easier moving forward.

With Betterment you are using their robo advisor so don’t expect to pick your own funds. I believe that Betterment leans a little heavier on foreign fund than other similar robo advisors. But that doesn’t really matter as you set your stock/bond percentage that matches your desired risk level and Betterment does the rest.

Betterment posts many helpful/interesting articles, but do take everything with a little grain of salt as many things are geared towards why they are right or how you can’t compare directly to other benchmarks.

All in all I have loved this investing/savings tool. I have seen good returns and low fees. BettermentInvestSaveMoney and web interface are clean and easy to use. Recommend for anyone looking to start investing/saving. If you are a more hands on investor, Betterment might not be for you, and you might want to look else where.

by Hotcrossfitdad

If I had the time, or the money, I would love to do all the trading myself. However, i simply don’t have the time.
With the extremely low account management fees and the simple portfolio selection process, I’ve been able to place small weekly sums of money into my betterment account and I haven’t had to worry about investing it myself. This has definitely made saving/planning much easier and convenient and I am excited about the future. I’d definitely recommend this to any young individual (high school or college especially) who wants to start saving for retirement but hasn’t yet because they don’t have the time. It took 20 minutes to set up and the application is extremely user friendly.

by Destivel

I’ve used Betterment for years now and I love the service. What I don’t get is that BettermentInvestSaveMoney keeps removing information. We used to be able to see our dollar and % gains for tax coordinated accounts, and now that information is gone. As far as I can tell, there has been no communication on why they changed this and it’s pretty clear that a lot of people want this. Just wish we knew why your making this information harder to find by making it website only.

Update: Coordinated returns are now viewable in app. This was my only complaint and I have updated my rating to reflect this. Thank you.

by Joab Paiva

I am still in love with Betterment, I continue to diligently do my research on others products available in the market but couldn’t find anything that beats Betterment. Easy to use, hands off goal oriented investment approach and now with checking and money management for me and my family. Looking forward to see what else they can bring. Keep innovating but never forget the core mission and values!
—— old review——
I am 4+ years Betterment customer and I like the way Betterment is evolving as a company to better serve the customers. I like BettermentInvestSaveMoney and the features, there are some room for improvement but overall I am very happy with it.

by Small Hobbit

Let me start by saying I haven’t been using BettermentInvestSaveMoney for all that long, but it’s already showing signs of being hard to use. The biggest example (and most glaring) is the fact that it seems to only allow for ONE bank to be connected at a time when ANY OTHER APP will allow you to connect whatever accounts you have to fund. This makes this extremely frustrating because the bank I’m trying to get this to use is my credit union since that usually has my spare cash but instead it keeps linking to a savings account that has a monthly withdrawal limit making this much more frustrating than it should be. Not to mention the fact that the only place you pretty much see this is either if you have an auto deposit (which I’ve had to turn all of them off) or in the settings. Having multiple banks added like ANY OTHER APP would mitigate this, but I guess whoever designed this thought they’d just be special and have it be one at a time. Since I don’t know if this os going to be fixed, I’m just going to use this as another savings account, and that’s what I’d suggest anyone else thinking of using this to do too.
Oh, another annoying thing is you can’t transfer less than $10 at a time; not as bad as the above problem since this is at least something that can be easily managed around, but still sightly annoying when their own app can suggest auto transfers of less and not be able to complete that because they have the limit set at $10.

by Marcus1341

I’m a huge fan of betterment and the concept behind it, although I have negative opinions on the over the phones customer experience. Just simple questions but for some reason the lady on the other end seemed to not really care for her job or the customer, no personality and just kind of rude over all not a great experience. As well as how big the company is, you think BettermentInvestSaveMoney would be just as good? BettermentInvestSaveMoney is terrible and have many complaints, most likely would have better like on there website but BettermentInvestSaveMoney has no special features, hard to get around and figure out what does what, BettermentInvestSaveMoney almost seems fake, which is disappointing because the company is actually a great company. Please create a better app !!!!

by KRN77

The Betterment app used to be pretty good. BettermentInvestSaveMoney would update on a fairly real time basis - you could check every few minutes and see how your portfolio was doing. They made a couple of changes that have made it worse. 1. The updates portfolio performance on a very irregular basis - it’s not even worth logging in during the day. 2. The old app would direct to your portfolio amount where you left off before - you could see what your balance was last time you checked and then it would refresh to the new number. The combination of these 2 changes make BettermentInvestSaveMoney a subpar experience. I’ve set up a wealthfront account to see if their app is better.

by Mstrdiver

Other have written about the benefits: ease of use, clean and simple design, automation, etc. My primary frustration and the reason for even leaving a review is that there is no real iPad support. (-1 star)

For a finance company built on technology, one would expect a proper application for iPads. I hate opening an app that “Supports iPads” only to find that BettermentInvestSaveMoney is the iPhone version simply ported to the iPad. I don’t want an iPhone size window to open on my iPad. I want BettermentInvestSaveMoney to take advantage of the screen real estate the iPad provides. In 2019, this is something for which users should not have to ask.

Personal Capital and Wealthfront are looking better and better.

by Jimmy Mysic

Why in the world would you take away the different time views of the graph reflecting the performance of your investments..???? Why do you guys constantly feel the need to change the design of BettermentInvestSaveMoney for the worse? It was at it’s most user-friendly/ most informative 3 years ago. It just keeps having features stripped away and it’s abysmal. More than market crashes or anything else, THIS has made me want to switch investment platforms more than anything else.

EDIT(in response to the dev response):
Why would you not at least make mention of this ‘slow transition of changes’ in the patch notes and save yourself from all the angry poor ratings? Great explanation, but it could have come a lot sooner.

by Ggiaquin16

A simple and clean app that allows you to do everything you need on a phone. I noticed a lot of bad reviews due to not being able to see portfolio break down. This is not an issue as you can look this up on a PC. During my lunch at work, I open the site to check on features not available on the phone. I think BettermentInvestSaveMoney provides just enough to not overload you with numbers. It provides the important details and if you need more, visit the site! Started with a $500 deposit and already up over 1% in 2 weeks. Overall a great service so far.