hello I am wanderer001 and this is my four and a half year review of using wealthfront the
Robo advisor financial platform if this is the first of my videos that you're seeing I'm going
to recommend that you click the I that should be popping up in the upper right hand corner as
that will take you to the full playlist of all of my videos that I've done for wealthfront so this
is mainly going to be talking about some of the account balances and changes and funding that I've
done just to give you an idea of how well this has been performing as a service there haven't
really been a lot of user interface changes to wealthfront itself mainly just you know here
you can see you have accounts and you have goals they separated this into two separate into two
separate pages now or tabs they've also moved your cash accounts to the top instead of having
your investment account so I'm not entirely sure why they chose to do that but because they did you
can see one of the biggest changes that's happened to wealthfront and it's their cash accounts their
cash account APY has been dropping and that's not to say that all other accounts haven't been
dropping as well Alli Marcus any of those other online a high-yield savings accounts have also
dropped however wealthfront now at 0.35% APY is almost the equivalent of what the brick and
mortars were getting a couple of month well not a couple months ago but several months ago so
they're high-yield savings account has turned into less of a high yields of savings account
and just a savings account now because of that I've actually taken money and you can see it
down here and set the majority of my combined savings account that I have with my wife and I
over to Marcus by Goldman Sachs because right now even though the rates have dropped their accounts
are still above 1% LP it just by a little bit and that's as of the filming day of June 29
2020 subject to change in the future if the APY for either of these cash accounts go back up I
will move money back in and that's what I hope happens because I really like the way that the
cash accounts handle showing the daily interest even though Marcus does daily interest as well
but well French shows you the daily interest it's right here I can move it into my investment
accounts if I wanted to but it's just at this APY I could not justify keeping the sum of money cash
why's that I was keeping in here I mean you can see right here there's a hundred twenty thousand
dollars in cash amongst my three accounts and again this is saving for something which is why
there's so much cash in this account now with that said and before we get into the actual
investment accounts there are plans to move wealthfront to the future in self-directed
money or self-driving money there was an email that came out the last video that I did talking
about some of the plans and more recently there was another email that went out that said exactly
what they were planning on doing and I've seen YouTube other YouTube videos of people saying
that they now have a debit card because now their cash account can act as a direct deposit act as a
checking act as a you know something you can draw a debit card against and for me right now that is
something I'm actually considering and looking forward to however I'm unclear as to why in my
account it hasn't shown up yet I don't know if that's because of the state I live in or what but
these are things that are on the future so again on that email that went out they're talking about
direct deposit which would be super useful for my side jobs pay your bills again super useful for my
side job make purchases with Apple pay and Google peg beautiful for the side jobs you can pay your
friends like VIN moe and PayPal right from your cash account not as useful for my business account
but you can see what they're looking to do and I'm just not entirely sure why they haven't done
that with my account yet again there's one or two youtubers that I've seen put out videos with the
debit card well front come on help me out help me help you help me just just saying I don't know if
it's because of the state I live in but if it's not let's let's make that happen because talking
with the ACPA I'm trying to separate all my side job money into separate accounts so that you know
should I be audited it's easier to take care of what that's talking about the cash accounts
again they're not great they're better than your brick-and-mortar because my brick-and-mortar is
getting point zero zero four percent APY so this is still better although there are other choices
out there and I hate to say that that are slightly higher but should wealthfront decide to increase
theirs I will bring money back in but let's talk about my investment accounts so I have an IRA and
I have a standard investment can we're going to start with our IRA and here we can see we're gonna
come down here because you could see some dips happening and let's just talk in 2020 things were
bad here we go here's the start of the thing that shall not be named on YouTube for monetization
purposes but we can see that there is a dip and I think this is probably the second time that
wealthfront as a Robo advisor has faced something like this the first being that 2018 housing crisis
and now we have the 2020 end of the world pretty much even though you can see my returns for 2024
this are negative that's only for this year if we come to our all-time we can see that I'm actually
still in the green aisle biet not as good as I was doing last year in fact last year my money
weighted return for my Roth IRA was 57 point 1 7 % I'm down to twenty nine point seven three if we're
looking for more of a time-weighted again that looks pretty good but prior six months you know
back in January before everything hit the fan I was doing I had 58 point three five percent now
we're at 45 point four one percent is that good it's still good it's not great compared to what
it used to be but it's still pretty good now if we come back up to the top we're gonna come over
to my investment count and we're gonna scroll this down and we're gonna look at 2020 and again here's
our dip took a little bit longer for this one because I've had it for less time and you can
see it's at negative six percent However tax-loss harvesting let me tell you the second the market
started going down and things started going sideways tax-loss harvesting kicked in here
you could say March 16th March 16th it started I had several taxable tax loss harvesting events
and you could see just for 2020 I have already harvested $833 if we compare that to 2019 with
86 2018 was my highest at 174 21 and 4 so by far the more you have the more you can actually save
with paper losses but let's talk about overall we are looking at a money way to return previously
of 37 point 5 3 percent we are currently at eleven point four seven so we're still up but it is down
coming to our time-weighted we are looking at 33 point eight four previously currently
we are at 21 point two six percent now during the changes that were happening in the market I
actually did a change to this investment account I upped my risk score in the middle of all of
the shenanigans now part of that was due to the fact where I'm looking to try and get a little
more return out of this investment account but also the commodities or natural resources that
were part of the original asset portfolio have just been tanking and they've been negative for
probably years now I went back and actually watched most of my videos and in most of them
they show up negative so I took advantage of the down market to cash out on those and reallocate
into the current portfolio balance which this is for 7.5 the their thing that I've done is I've
actually started taking some of my gas money that I'm not spending because I'm working from home and
adding that into the investment account so now I'm up to doing two hundred and fifty dollars a
month as opposed to the two hundred I was doing proof before granted it's chump change to some
but every little bit helps and you know should things continue this way I will probably be able
to open another $50 so I can actually put three hundred dollars in here a month again this is
my personal outlook yours might be different but this is just me telling you what my experiences
have been using well from so back to our main page here the other thing that I did test with my cash
accounts was taking some money from a cash account and placing it into an investment account to see
how long that transaction would actually take because I wanted to say you know we've tested
from my actual brick-and-mortar account in to this and what I found is it's roughly a day so
you start the transaction if you start it before 10 o'clock then you're more likely to get it
processed if you do it mid day you'll be waiting until the next day for it to process so it's not
terrible like the self-driving money model that they are moving towards if they gave me the debit
card and checking features for this account would be much better but they're definitely on the right
path now again some people might not like the Robo and the hands-off approach me myself I like being
able to add money and just have it do what it needs to do I went back and I watched all of my
old videos before doing this video because I was trying to find something aside from just talking
about the accounts and how they were doing that I could share with you in changes that were made
and I noticed the further along my financial path that I was going the more involved I was getting I
was adding more money I was making changes to the account trying to optimize the hands-off approach
which is perfectly acceptable and fine for most last bit I did complain in my last video about
the cash accounts having their paperwork show up in the documents area early enough for my liking
wouldn't you know it after I put that video out there was a new line in the documents area saying
that hey don't worry those documents were coming by said day and I did have them before taxes so
that was perfectly fine so all in all wealthfront is a very good hands-off robo-advisor it is
becoming more and more useful as time goes on so I do hope that they continue to make it as useful
as they have now quit pandering if you use the affiliate link that I have down in the description
area below you can get $5,000 of assets managed for free even if you were considering wealthfront
for a cash account which right now not gonna lie probably not the best idea there are other better
options out there but if you wanted to start off with a cash account and move into an investment
account I highly recommend using the link down below using that will get you five thousand
dollars of assets managed fee free and again you might not be planning on doing this now but in
the future you never know what happens it doesn't hurt you clicking the link and if you do you help
me out by giving me an extra five thousand dollars of assets managed fee free after that you can get
your own affiliate link and you can share it with all your friends so I have been wondering one this
has been my four and a half a year review of wealthfront Robo advisor asset manager
self-directed Money platform whatever they're gonna brand this going forward and I know the
second that I stopped doing this video I'm gonna get that debit card or they're gonna announce a
new feature so sadly we're gonna have to wait six months for that update but for now these have been
my thoughts on utilizing the platform for four and a half years if you have any questions or
comments please feel free to leave them in the area below and as always thanks for watching