More Thoughts on Betterment Vs M1

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 50/50. As your Growth pie increases in value, subsequent contributions and dividends will be used to move the portfolio towards parity.

Savings: $1000

Growth: $1000

Let's say your Growth pie increases 5%

Savings: $1000

Growth: $1050

You decide to put $100 into the account:

Savings $1075

Growth $1075

In order to return to parity, $50 was put into the Savings account, then the difference was split into both accounts. 

Anecdotally - I want a cash and safety net of ~14,000 (6-8 months of expenses) I'm willing to let that amount grow in a mixture of low-risk investments with minimal contributions. If I wanted to put the excess towards growth investments within the same portfolio at M1, I'll constantly be adjusting and/or re-balancing the account on each contribution. However, with two separate investment portfolios at M1, I can control contributions to each independently and one does not have any effect on the other.