Sumwatt

... and the way to tackle yours may be 1000 + 1 At one point in time I was staring down the barrel of $35,000 in debt. It was a mixture of credit cards, student loans and vehicle loans. That number doesn't seem to large compared to some of the more shocking debt loads people are carrying quite regularly. But when you're making $0, $35,000 looks the same as $100,000 in debt. Thankfully, I found a decent paying job that appreciated my contributions and paid me, relatively, well. When I started to look at where to start paying down my debt, someone suggested Dave Ramsey's debt snowball method. Simply put (to the best of my recollection) - take your highest interest debt and pay it down the fastest while making minimum payments on the rest of your debt. In theory this works great. Over time, you actually save yourself money. But everyone's situation is unique or may require more nuance. One of the issues I had was a cash-flow problem. Between paying bills and living...

One thing you'll find lacking on both Betterment and M1 is research. In Betterment you can drill down into each of your investments and they give a quick summary of what the ETF is and why it was selected. For Betterment's purposes, this is enough information. You can click through to each fund's prospectus on the appropriate supporting site. What you won't find are performance metrics. Which, to be fair to Betterment, is why you're using their service - you don't want to think about your investments and you, generally speaking, don't need to constantly check your balance. For M1, you have a bit more information. You get basic stock/ETF/Expert Pie data. For stocks, you get news and some graphs. Overall, the information is fairly basic. For both services, if you are a news junkie, you may want to supplement your reading with some other sites.

Betterment has a superior user interface in most regards. You can drill down and see how many shares you have in each fund in your underlying portfolio, the charts are reasonably easy to understand and you get a nice bird's-eye view of all of your accounts after logging in. While M1 has a superior fee structure (free!), if you truly want to mimic Betterment, you're probably going to be opening a couple of different accounts. You can lump all of your taxable investments into one account holding multiple pies (similar to Betterment). However - the key difference here is that you can't put money directly into one pie like you can apply funds to a goal at Betterment. Your deposits are distributed by the percentages you allocate to the pie. This can, quite possibly, hinder your investment goals. For example, let's say you have two very different goals in one account - one Savings, one Growth - Your start with $1000 in each pie and the Pie contributions are split 50/...

I've been investing with Betterment for a few years. Their approach is simple: make a goal - save for it. Much of the guesswork of picking investments is taken out of your hands and your money is applied to a tailored portfolio ideally designed to have a reasonable chance of meeting your goal. These investment portfolios are constructed using modern portfolio theory with the idea of using low-cost index ETFs to achieve results. The fee for this service will run you ~.25% per year. There is very little choice, outside of a Goldman-Sachs derived portfolio option you can opt into. You can, to some degree, alter the risk profile of your portfolio (increase/decrease your stock/bond exposure) but the underlying investment choices are largely made up for you. This is a great option for the passive investor who wants to put away money for simple goals such as: Saving for a mortgage down payment Saving for a down payment on a new car Saving for retirement Putting surplus saving...

This is an M1 Pie using the Betterment SmartSaver portfolio

This is an approximation of my Betterment 90% Stock / 10% bond portfolio. The numbers will be a bit off due to M1 requiring full percentage points in a pie piece. Click on the image to go to M1 and check it out.