Useful Finance Links

I use several tools and sites to manage my money. Below are some links that may help you.

Reddit: Personal Finance - This is a great community (13+ million subscribers) dedicated to helping people clean up their act when it comes to money.  They have lots of great advice and are always ready to help out.  I've learned a lot from reading peoples questions and the answers provided by the community.  I strongly recommend checking it out, starting with the Prime Directive.

Mr. Money Mustache - An awesome blog about finance, early retirement, investment, and other money related issues for the common man.  Full of useful tips while also being very entertaining.  The forums are also worthwhile to read through.

Vanguard - If you are going to open a large investment account, with long-term planning (i.e. retirement) in mind, this should be your first step.  Unlike other commercial banks or investment firms, Vanguard is owned by the investors.  What does that mean for you? It means very very low fees, just enough to cover costs.  There are no shareholders to pay off, so the savings are passed back to you.  One caveat, most funds require a minimum investment, usually to the tune of $3-5k.  If you haven't hit that point in your investing, it's worth looking at Betterment (description below).

Robinhood - (First a warning, I do not endorse investing in individual stocks and companies as a long-term plan to any but the very savvy and experienced investors.  All studies show that the vast majority of people who try to lose money over investing in index funds.) Robinhood is a free stock brokerage company.  There are no fees to buy and sell stocks and ETFs.  I recommend Robinhood as a great place for someone with no money invested yet and only a few hundred dollars to begin. All of your trades are done online and it is very intuitive.  This is a good way to buy single shares of index fund ETFs (like this one) to build up a small portfolio until you are ready to step up to a larger brokerage or move to Vanguard.

Betterment - I like betterment for stashing away funds.  It is what they call a "Robo-advisor", in that it uses modern portfolio theory to balance your money between investments based on your timeline.  You set goals and it will calculate how much to put away each month to have a strong chance of meeting your goal.  It also has settings for emergency funds and just building wealth.

A key feature I like about Betterment is the ability to move excess funds from your savings account into an investment automatically. This is extremely useful if you have uneven payments (work in sales etc), or haven't made a budget yet but want to automate some initial savings.

The link above will give you 90 days free investing.  After that, it's 0.25% per year of holdings.  To put that in perspective, if you keep a $10,000 emergency fund, they will charge you $25/yr to automatically reinvest dividends (often 1-2% a year) and rebalance your account.  I've decided that as the account will average $500 in earnings and gains a year, that automation is worth it to me.

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