Wealthsimple Review! Simple investing on autopilot - YouTube

Hey everyone! Bridget from Money After Graduation here to give you a totally

honest review of Wealthsimple. This is not a sponsored video but I am an affiliate of

Wealthsimple which means if you sign up using my link -- which I'll leave in the

description below -- I do get a small payout for you opening an account with

them. To say thank you for this they're actually going to give you up to $10,000

managed for free! So Wealthsimple already has pretty low fees

but nothing's lower than zero, and they'll give that to you for a full year

if you sign up using my link. If you don't want me to use money to pay my

rent and clothe my baby you can still sign up for Wealthsimple by just going to

Wealthsimple.com and not using my link. But that's okay. Like, it's fine. It's

totally fine. Anyway, let's jump into it! The best features of Wealthsimple are

obviously hassle-free investing. You don't need to have a degree in finance

like I do and paid a lot of money for, in order to invest with Wealthsimple. It's a

robo-advisor, which means investing is automatic for you. It's not actually a

robot behind the scenes. It's a person, or probably a team of people, that are

actually making the decisions of what stocks to buy and sell for your

portfolio. The "robo" part just means you put your money in and the rest is taken

care of. This is perfect because frankly, everyone should be investing in the

stock market and before when you needed to learn how to do so, that was a huge

barrier to people gaining access to the stock market. So Wealthsimple removes that

barrier and it really makes the stock market available for everyone. If you

know that investing is something that you should be doing, but are not, Wealthsimple

is the perfect solution for you. Alternatively, if you're currently

managing your portfolio like I am outside of Wealthsimple, it can still have

a place for you in your financial plan. I resisted signing up for Wealthsimple for

a really long time because I was managing my own stock portfolio and I

didn't think that it could do a lot for me. But I signed up for account because

so many of you were asking me to review it. Once I did, I loved it! And now I

actually love having some of my money being managed by someone else. I mean

it's just a way of further diversifying your portfolio. So I still do manage most

of my investments on Questrade where I make my own stock buying and selling

decisions, but I love having my Wealthsimple account and having some money

just being taken care of for me. Wealthsimple charges a small fee of 0.5% for

managing your portfolio. This is a fraction of what's being charged for

traditional mutual funds so it's like honestly a steal of the deal. And that

pays for the expertise of someone else taking on the project of deciding what

to add and remove from the portfolio while you just sit back and watch the

balance grow. As mentioned previously, if you use my links that I've left in the

description below, you will get this fee waived up to $10,000 so you can

invest totally free. One of the really great things about Wealthsimple is

they'll let you open an RRSP or TFSA or RESP for your child. They let you have

both unregistered or registered accounts so you can take advantage of tax

sheltering your money in the stock market. This is really important because

the best way to put these accounts to work is to invest in the stock market

but a lot of people don't know that! And I don't blame them because RRSP is called

the Registered Retirement "Savings" Plan and the TFSA is called the Tax-Free

"Savings" Account. But these can and should be investment accounts and you can make

them investment accounts at Wealthsimple. Think how awesome it is for all your

dividends, interest, capital gains to grow completely tax-free in the TFSA or tax

deferred in the RRSP in Wealthsimple. That's amazing! Another great aspect is,

if you do open all these accounts like an RRSP, TFSA, an RESP, and just an

unregistered investing account, if you hit a balance of $100,000 over all your

Wealthsimple accounts, you'll actually be eligible for their VIP service

which is called Wealthsimple Black. This entitles you to a lower management fee,

so it actually drops from 0.5% to 0.4%, and it comes with a few additional perks

like access to airport lounges, one-on-one financial coaching, and things

like that. I haven't tried Wealthsimple Black yet because I don't have a $100,000

in my Wealthsimple account yet, but ask me again in a year

or two. No. But it does seem to be a really great option that adds a little

bit more to your investing experience. I found getting my money into Wealthsimple

was ridiculously easy. I just set up an electronic funds transfer and it

showed up right away in two to three business days, like electronic funds

transfers always do. But now I actually have an automatic deposit going from my

KOHO account to Wealthsimple every month and

that shows up on the day it's due. I can see my money appearing mu

Wealthsimple account and get immediately invested in the stock market before I

even registered as withdrawn from my KOHO account. If you don't know what KOHO

is I have a video on that, which I'll link below as well. The only thing I want

to note is my referral code for KOHO has changed. It's actually BRIDGET20 now

instead of BRIDGET10 because as you might guess, you get more money. You get $20

instead of $10 when you sign up. But this is not a video about KOHO! This

video is about Wealthsimple. Some other things that I really love about Wealthsimple

is just the user interface. It's really beautiful, it's really easy to use.

I love the web-based platform and I love their app. So great, nice to navigate.

This is the best part of FinTech because I find the Canadian banks -- not gonna call

them lazy with their user experience, but it's not that slick. And Wealthsimple

definitely has that cool startup feel, where it's a beautiful

intuitive experience for you to use on your computer or on your phone. One of

the things that I love about it, is it shows how much you've invested, what

your rate of return is, and it also gives you a projection of what they expect

your account to grow to over time. So you can actually see how your money is going

to work and have a little bit in mind of what exactly it's going to become over

time for you. The other thing I really like in their app is they link news

stories, and a series they call the Money Diaries, where they interview celebrities about

their finances. Because I'm just super curious about what everyone does

with their money, I love reading these stories and seeing how other people are

managing their money. So it's not totally just financial content of your own

accounts , Wealthsimple does bring a lot more to the table that is like

entertainment valu. Another thing to note is they also offer a savings

account called the Wealhsimple Smart Savings. This savings account has an

interest rate of 2% right now which is really good. The only thing I can think

of that's higher than that is EQ Bank right now, at 2.30%, but

2% is still really solid. It's higher than most other places. So if

you're in a position where you're like, "man, I really got to get my finances in order!

I gotta save money! I gotta invest!" You can do it all with Wealthsimple. So

now I've done nothing but sing the praises of

Wealthsimple for many minutes, but there are some downsides and drawbacks to using it,

depending on what kind of investor you are. And because this is an honest Wealthsimple

review, I'm gonna share them here. The first downside of Wealthsimple is

obviously that it is totally automated and therefore as an investor you don't

have a lot of control of how your money is being invested. I mean, this is the

point of Wealthsimple, but if you're typically a self-directed investor like

me, it's a little uncomfortable to not be able to make every single trading

decision for your portfolio. Instead when you sign up for Wealthsimple, you just

do a quiz that assesses your risk profile, and then they're like, "here are

some of your choices, what portfolio do you want?" Some of the things and

the stocks that they buy, and allocations, I'm like, I'm not sure that I

would buy that for myself. It's not that they're bad investments by any means,

it's just like not what I would pick. And every month I get an email from them

with like an update on my account and they're like, "we made 85 trades for you

this month" on it. Holy cow, that's so many, cuz I'm more a passive

investor in my own portfolio and I would never make that many trades. So just even

seeing that number, I'm like "yikes!" But again this isn't necessarily a bad

thing, it's just I have a different perspective of it because I've always

been managing my own stock portfolio. Another thing that bugged me initially

but has since been resolved, I think maybe because I was tweeting and

blogging about it, but when I was first invested in Wealthsimple's portfolios, they

only listed the stock tickers of what companies you were invested in. And

granted I knew what they were because I've been staring at the stock market every

day for ten years, but if you're a less experienced investor it wouldn't be

really easy to know which company your money is being invested in from just the

stock tickers. They've since resolved that. It's really clear of where exactly your

money is going and how that makes you feel is the other issue. They do

offer socially responsible investing portfolios but even when I clicked on

those I was a little surprised at some of the companies that are on that list. If

that's something that's important to you, just take a close and critical look at

it because what you might think is socially responsible, maybe a company

that identifies as socially responsible doesn't agree. Nevertheless, Welathsimple

offers an awesome, no hassle approach to investing in the

stock market and it's easy for absolutely everyone to get started with.

Whether you need a TFSA, RRSP, or you're looking to just invest in a general

unregistered account, this is the perfect option no matter your investing savvy.

Like I said, I'm a self-directed investor with an MBA in finance and I still love

having my money invested with Wealthsimple. I hope you guys enjoyed this long

overdue review of Wealthsimple! If you did please give it a thumbs up and subscribe

to my channel. Leave a comment below and let me know if you're currently

investing with Wealthsimple or you're managing your portfolio another way. And

I'd love to hear your thoughts on what's out there or what you would like me to

review next! I'll see you guys later. Bye!