Think about it—when we’re paying with cash, we normally discard the loose change or leave it in our car— but with Acorns, our loose change is going into earning us money in the long run.Â
Acorns is the perfect way to “girl math” your way into saving money. The app allows you to turn on a round-up setting, which will round up any purchase on the card you link and automatically invest it for you.
What Acorns does is round up each of your purchases, and for every $5.00 collected, new investments are made. This is meant to gradually help you save hundreds of dollars without even noticing.
When budgeting out my purchases, I would always think of a $7.45 purchase as an $8.00 one, even though there was some spare change involved. With Acorns round-ups, that extra $0.55 is automatically put toward my investments instead of sitting unused.
When I was starting, I only had automatic round-ups on for a year and was able to save over $100 into an untouched account. After a while, I decided to change the setting on my round-ups so that it would double the spare change for each purchase– a $7.65 purchase would now mean investing $0.70– which has gotten my Acorns fund to $550.67.
One of the best things about Acorns is that for someone new to investing, you don’t have to know about stocks, which makes the process easier to manage. I think the most intimidating part of investing is deciding which stocks to buy.
With Acorns, your spare change is automatically invested into Stock ETFs and Bond ETFs, which are pooled collections of securities that trade on public stock exchanges. Yet, if you are interested in customizing your portfolio, Acorns allows you to do that as well.Â
Beyond that, it is also a great platform to start familiarizing yourself with how the stock market works. Acorns lets you select custom stocks and invest a percentage of your portfolio in them—for example, I’ve invested in Amazon, Apple, McDonald’s, and Starbucks.Â
The app offers many tutorials and articles explaining what investing is and how to start, depending on where you are in your life and how much you are looking to invest. Its learning section includes videos such as “Investing strategies for beginners,” “How to build an investment portfolio,” and even “How to set up round-ups.”
Their platform is designed to help investors of all experience levels build their portfolios and gain insight into making financially responsible decisions, with articles such as “5 questions to ask yourself before buying a home.”Â
Another way I like to invest in my Acorns portfolio is through a recurring investment. Once a month, Acorns automatically transfers the amount I have set into my portfolio, and I can change that amount whenever I want. While I was working over the summer, I had a recurring investment of $25, and now it’s only $10, which shows how easily I can adapt Acorns to my financial situation.Â
I think of a recurring investment as investing a cup of coffee in my future. If I normally spend $10 on a latte and pastry, I can choose to skip that purchase and put $10 into my investment instead. In a way, I’m taking the money I would have spent on something temporary and doubling down on myself by putting the same amount toward my future.
In the end, it’s a small change in how I spend my money that can make a big difference in how I prepare for my future.
You can do this too! By opening an account and easily setting up recurring investments, you can start saving thousands for your future while still in college.