Ellevest Review (With Detailed Explanation)

What is up everyone, I'm rose and welcome back to my channel in this video I'm gonna be giving you an honest review of Elvis, which is an investing app designed specifically for women So what are the pros and cons? How does the app work and should you use it to invest your money? Let's go for a tour of my account after trying out a bunch of different investing apps I can say that Elvis offers quite a unique experience in this video. I'll point out the pros and cons I'll show you exactly how your money gets invested when you open an account at Elvis And finally, I'll make recommendations on who it's for and who it's not for before we get started I'd love for you to subscribe my channel is all about stock investing for beginners and it's my mission to empower everyday people just like you especially Women to win at investing. So make sure to subscribe and hit the notification bellow for new videos like this every week So let's get right into it I'm going to first talk about the pros my absolute favorite thing about Elvis and something that differentiates it from other Robo advisors is its goals based approach to investing what this means is that instead of organizing your investments by account type the platform lets you organize your investments by gold now all that's specially develop this because after doing a bunch of research and surveying a lot of women They found that women prefer to invest to achieve specific financial goals in their life. Not necessarily To make the highest market return or to grow their money really fast. They just want to achieve their goals so again This goes back to the fact that Elvis is designed Specifically for women and helps women invest the way they want to invest most of the other platforms out there Typically organize your investments by account type so Roth IRA traditional IRA brokerage account, etc You can even look at my fidelity account and you can see that it's it's organized by account type So that's how most other investing platforms are and when you open an account anywhere the first question They usually ask you is what type of account you want to open and if you're not sure because you're a beginner it can be Kind of overwhelming But when you open an account at Elvis, the first thing they ask you is what financial goals you're saving for You can pick things like saving up for a house for retirement. I'm Creating an emergency fund. I want to start my own business this I want to have a baby soon Or I'm just building wealth with this approach You don't have to worry about opening the right account type because based on your goal Elvis will guide you through that So the app makes it really easy for you to get started and I was able to set up my accounts correctly and get started investing towards my goals within minutes I also think that organizing everything by goals keeps you more motivated every time you log in and see your Elvis dashboard it Reminds you that you have concrete financial goals in your life that you're investing for It's easy to stop your monthly auto deposit when you're not really sure what you're saving for But with Elvis you'll probably think twice before doing that because it makes it so clear of what you're working towards Another Pro is that Elvis is really good about helping you budget and make projections So that you know exactly how much you need to save every month to achieve each of your goals For example, one of my goals is to buy a house for my parents in the next six years and I need to decide how much I'm going to invest initially and then for the Ongoing monthly auto deposit and rather than guessing at the numbers and hoping and praying that I'll have enough to actually Buy the house in six years Elvis tells me what to do to have enough for a down payment on a house in six years Elvis is recommending that I make a one-time deposit today of about fifteen thousand dollars and then regular monthly Deposits of one thousand two hundred forty bucks and if you don't have fifteen thousand to deposit right now You can lower the amount to see what happens So if I put in five thousand for example for the initial deposit Then Elvis will recalculate it for me and let me know how much I'll have instead in six years now Are there projections reliable there's no guarantees with the stock market? But there are high probability outcomes and low probability outcomes So if Elvis is forecasting that your investment will be worth X amount of dollars in a certain number of years They've crunched a ton of historical data to show you the highest probability outcome So this number here is what Elvis algorithm is telling me I have a 70% chance of ending up with I think it's better to make budgeting decisions based on high probability outcomes Versus shooting in the dark and with Elvis budgeting recommendations and projections You can make informed decisions to maximize your chances of actually being able to buy that house in six years or whatever your goal and timeline may be now for the cons the one that jumps out to me most is that the app doesn't give you a lot of flexibility in terms of investment options So Elvis, you only have two types of portfolios to choose from you have their core versus impact portfolio You can buy individual stocks and you can pick your own mutual funds or ETFs with your Elvis account So if you wanted to buy Amazon stock because you think it's a great company or you really want to add XYZ stock to your portfolio because you think it'll do well you can't so while I've listed this as a con It's not necessarily a bad thing Frankly, most people don't have the know-how to pick their own stocks anyway And if you don't know what factors to consider when picking investments, then you're definitely better off sticking with one of Elvis professionally designed portfolios so Robo advisors like Elvis are perfect for newbie investors who just want a good Diversified portfolio and want to put their money to work without knowing too much about investing But of course if you do know how to pick your own stocks and you want to be able to do that Then you won't be able to do it in your Elvis account for that You can check out other investing platforms like stash Robinhood or fidelity. So what I do is a mix of Passive investing and active investing what that means is I'll I have an account at Elvis where I do a bunch of diversified you know Robo advisor type investing and then I have a separate account at fidelity as well as TradeStation where I do other things that I can't do on Robo advisors such as Individual stock investing options trading and so on and so forth. Another con I want to talk about is the annual fee While the app makes investing as easy for you as possible these benefits do come at a cost so in return for managing your investments Elvis charges in annual fee of 0.25 percent Which is pretty much in line with what all other Robo advisors charge what this means is that if you have five thousand