Hello I am Wanderer001 and this is my three year follow-up review
and look at of wealthfront a automated Robo advising service there are a few
things that I'm going to touch on that have been added or changed or I feel
need to be discussed but really this is just a follow up so you can see how my
accounts have been doing so with any luck this will be shorter than the other
videos that I've done in the past if this is the first video of mine that
you're seeing for wealthfront I recommend going in the upper right hand
corner there should be an I popping up and that will take you to a playlist of
the evolution and my progress using wealthfront
so first and foremost the big change that came to wealthfront at the end of
2018 currently filming this end of January 2019 is this the path tool the
path tool one not gonna harp on it change the icon again for retirement no
longer a palm tree looks like a little star but the path tool and all its
goodness is now free for everybody to use you no longer need a Wealthfront
account in order to use this particular service for other things you will but
the path tool is now free for all second new thing and or update under what if I
one they change that naming convention but you had by house safer College
received wind fall now you can take time off to travel I do believe that they
change the name of this because I played with the tool when it first came out and
I was like well this just kinda seems weird with what they had a call so the
name has changed but the idea is still the same and what is that idea well if
we click this path event it will say travel so dreaming big it will say hey
we're gonna analyze some stuff to find out the the gist of it is based on what
you have how long can you take a sabbatical from actually needing to work
now over here it will show you here are your connected accounts now it doesn't
show you all of the accounts but this is the total network because there's
Vanguard and two Merrill Lynch it's not showing the Wealthfront ones anymore
which they changed the way that UI look but no big deal you can
more for better advice and then here you can edit your current household income
this is between my wife and I so we're gonna say see how long I can travel for
so based on the current information that is inside the wealthfront system it's
like hey you can travel for six months and you would be comfortable so for
those six months we would spend twenty five thousand dollars roughly four
thousand two hundred fifty eight dollars per those six months now here you do
notice that there is a sliding scale so here it's showing you how long you could
do that now if I were to try and say I'm going to do this for a year now it's
going to change you know how much so it's not fifty one thousand still
spending the same amount and I'm gonna show you where that amount is coming
from because it goes how will I fund this and it says you know here's cash
and it doesn't look like you have enough cash now there's this show details which
I will get into because that's partially where the calculations are coming from
now you will notice that it says net worth at sixty-five decreased by two
hundred thousand dollars because I shifted this from a year now if I go
back to six months you'll notice this number changes to a hundred thousand
dollars so it's saying you know based on you taking off you're not you know
adding any source of income so this will affect you in some way shape or form
which is understandable now if we select down here it's like how will this impact
my plan well here for retirement you'll say fourteen thousand dollars less and
it will decrease my net worth almost a hundred thousand dollars you know you'll
be back on track to retire planning assume assuming you return to earning
this amount and saving what I'm currently saving and you will have one
point eight thousand left by the time I'm ninety I can go back and edit my
retirement planning right from here or I can come down here and say other goals
so I can explore other goals now these are all now considered goals instead of
path events I'm going to collapse that and if we scroll down here it's gonna
set hey you can set when you want to start your sabbatical now it says I
would be starting this in July of 2019 with no income while traveling well that
is true for most you know if you're not working you're not making money and here
spending it shows 4258 now you can operate this on a sliding scale or you
can edit it here and make your changes you can also come down here and learn
about traveling costs which opens up this details area which I will show you
momentarily here it also says you know some advice so you're saving enough for
your trip you know dream of blah blah blah with some links and then digital
nomad for this much and it's like hey you can kind of budget so it will help
you with budgeting now the portion that I keep hiding or referencing but not
showing you is up here this detail so travel costs how is it assuming your
travel cost and it gives you a description of all of this so it's like
hey you want to be a cheapskate do you want to be thrifty or do you want to
live large and that's how its estimating your monthly so right now it's actually
estimating that I'm kinda into the living large so I really wouldn't say I
spend this much in a month so if I were to change this to 2,600 you'll notice
that this is comfortable and I can even say hey I want another month and it I'm
still comfortable without greatly impacting my retirement now we're gonna
close that one and say housing costs so this is hey do you have rent do you you
know during travel is this going to stay the same you can say yes it's going to
stay the same or you can say no I'm not going to be renting while I'm traveling
so you know some people just travel in an RV and they no longer have any rent
this will show you your account returns just like it does for many of the other
areas inside of wealthfront so I won't be showing you that because that's kind
of a lot of sensitive data likewise with the finances and household and down here
managing goals will allow you to mark this goal as completeness meaning you
finish your estimations here or you can delete this goal in
now coming back to the income while travelling you can actually say that you
are going to earn some income either you or your partner since my wife and I are
both listed on this particular account so I can say custom and say well since
I'm a super famous youtuber maybe I can make $200 a month and I'm gonna hit
enter and that will save that come down here and hit save and now it's added
into the calculation now granted $200 a month isn't going to do a lot but you
know hey it's $200 of gas money for my little sabbatical here so I can select
done and then either come and mark the rule is complete or done go to my
overview so we're just gonna go done go to my overview and now you'll see here's
my little sabbatical right here and thankfully I am still on track to have 6
months of being off and retiring comfortably now this is one of the big
changes to... I added a lot of extra information into my retirement because
well I wanted to make it more complete and by that I added some pension funds
and I've slowly been increasing the amount of money that my wife and I put
in I'm pushing this number up to for the total amount spending during retirement
to kind of keep me motivated because as you can see here I'm kind of on the cusp
of you will have just enough and what you need now that's not to say that I
will be super set I would like to save more because well I I kind of use it as
a motivating factor so I'll probably change it again so that I will be saving
even more now you'll notice that this number did go down a bit because well I
took six months off of not.. but you know making money or at least as much if I go
in here and delete it we're going to say delete path tool changes again and
you'll notice that I now have a hundred thousand dollars extra in my calculation
now account breakdown I want to touch on I'm not gonna show you because I don't
feel like having to blur them out but the breakdown for each account will show
you how much money is going into those accounts I recently
my IRA because well now the minimum for an IRA if we come in here I'll just pop
in there the minimum contribution is six thousand dollars as opposed to previous
whose previous years where it was 5500 for the longest time my wealthfront IRA
was not displaying the correct amount being deposited and I'm not sure why but
after I told it well I'm going to be increasing my contribution it changed it
and has been holding on to that new number quite well coming back to the
main page here what I also want to talk about is linked accounts this is
something new that wealthfront has done and they have added support for coinbase
so if you are into cryptocurrency you can come up in here and you can say
there you go coinbase so if you like crypto you can now have that as part of
your path total okay so now let's get into some of the actual returns because
hey that's kind of what you want to know I've been using this for three years so
how well are your accounts doing now I will start off by saying 2018 was rough
like you can see over here there is a dip and that dip is definitely in 2018
where I actually had for the first time in my IRA my account balance be worth
less than my initial deposits now I'm not saying that that's bad it's it was a
rough year all around but I had noticed a severe drop-off in people who are
using wealthfront because I can keep track of my referrals
even even my friends who are using my referral code we're saying hey you know
it's not performing like I thought it would and part of that is again it's
based on when you come into the market like I've been using this for three
years and I was doing pretty good until 2018 when all screwy yes we had super
market returns towards the beginning of the year but for me like when I would
put in or when I had my auto transfer going on it felt like the next day the
the market would go down so kind of wish there was like a pause button where it's
like I still want to do my deposit but maybe just hold off for like a day
because I can see things are coming I realized that takes away some of the
automation that wealthfront offers but I figured it could give you like some more
control and and again it's all about the long game with wealthfront so just keep
that in mind yes you're gonna see ups and downs this is probably the first
time that the that wealthfront has actually seen a down market so I did see
a lot of people abandoning ship and and I'm just trying to say stick it out it's
well worth it for the long haul now coming to my returns here we can see our
money way to return now in comparison to previous six months this has gone down
it's still in the green but it has gone down previously we're at twenty three
point four percent we are currently at seventeen point eight three if we check
our time-weighted return this one's actually pretty good because it was
thirty one point six the previous six months and currently it is only
thirty-one point zero eight so in the long haul this is doing pretty good
and again time-weighted is what you want because that'll give you a better
overview of your portfolio and coming down here again still wish they had
dividends somewhere still wish they would do fractional shares still wish
that they would pull my other outside institutions a little more often because
you know it's like three days sometimes before they actually bring that
information into wealthfront and I just wish that was a little more regular so
coming back up we're gonna go back to my overview and we are going to go into my
investment account now this is the one that really hurt because this one hasn't
been as active for as long as my IRA and you can see I've slipped well below my
deposit for awhile there at the end of 2019 now the other thing to consider
with your taxable account is tax loss harvesting if you notice back in 2017
because that's the first full year that I was using wealthfront's taxable
investment account tax-loss harvesting only $21.91 if you
come to 2018 you will notice that just for 2018 it tax-loss harvesting one
hundred and seventy four dollars and 92 cents that that is what this is good for
in a turbulent market it will save you some long-term and short-term capital
gains by tax loss harvesting your losses so even in 2019 it tax loss harvesting
you can see also in 2019 it has come up now above my deposit threshold
thankfully but looking at our all-time you could see two hundred and nine
dollars worth of tax I was harvesting but let's talk about returns again this
one has taken a hit so money weighted previously was 13.04 is currently three
point eight so that has taken a bit of a hit like I said this one has been open
for less time than my IRA and time-weighted was sixteen point nine six
it is currently thirteen point seven four so again it has taken a bit of a
hit but time-weighted shows not as bad as I would have thought now the one
issue I do have with tax loss harvesting and it's a personal issue I want to say
is because it's it's selling at a loss and buying similar stakes I have found
that if it does that close to when you're supposed to receive a dividend
quarterly you can be getting dividends from those less profitable assets and I
do realize that dividends are not the make and break of your accounts but it
kind of did upset me a little bit where I'm like oh I could have been getting
Vanguard this this or this and instead you know it put me into a Schwab so here
you can see because of tax loss harvesting I'm currently in Schwab which
is the lowest of their recommended ETFs instead of the Vanguard so I I was
getting Schwab dividends instead of Vanguard dividends which tended to be
a little higher and again that's just me putting out information there it's not
terrible tax loss harvesting in the long run will save you and and that's what
it's meant to do it's just personal personal pet peeve now speaking of if we come
over to the your investment strategy area again there is no dividends sadly
on this page I remember talking about this area so if we come up to change
this looks much different than it did previously because there was like all
these information there was just a little drop-down arrow
no real recommendation to hey go up here and change it now they've changed it
totally so you can see a clear progression as you go up you either are
not doing any tax loss harvesting you are doing tax loss harvesting you're doing
half tax loss harvesting at the stock level and smart beta but you need to
reach these particular thresholds and then recommended they did have
recommended on the other one all of that smart beta plus the risk parity and then
you can continue so I'm happy that wealthfront did make that a little
easier to understand for people who may be trying to figure out if that's
something that they need now I will also say that wealthfront
while it is a newer and growing company has had a few little missteps this year
first was with risks risk parity but then it was you know news was reported
that the SEC had slapped wealthfront with a $250,000 fine based on some of
the practices that they were doing so from October 2012 to mid 2016 so about
May while they stated that they were daily tax loss harvesting and checking
for wash sales for all accounts they really weren't doing that I guess they
were only doing it for some accounts I'm assuming once you got to a certain
certain threshold so they weren't doing it for all accounts which kind of got
them in trouble with the SEC because you're saying you're doing that and you
kind of need to be doing that the other thing was compliance with social media
usage and that was kind of hey they were not saying that things that they were
promoting on their Twitter account were pretty much like people who were hey
we'll give you some money to put this out there and then they were using it as
like a testimonial so it's kind of like truth in
disclosure type of stuff so realistically for me
I didn't start using wealthfront investment account until after 2016 so
my account was always daily tax loss harvesting and checked for wash sales
and that's part of what you're gonna get with fine tech it's it's growing it's
learning it's evolving there are going to be some missteps do I think this
makes it so that I wouldn't use wealthfront
no they're small missteps they're learning they improved they paid the
fine there was another Robo advisor who was listed as having not similar issues
but we're also fined by the SEC for something else entirely
so in the long run I still like it as a fully automated investment service I
will be continuing to use it as my primary retirement and investment
vehicle so with that said wealthfront no longer offers $10,000 for a signup bonus
if you happen to use somebody's referral link like the one that I will have in
the description area below you will get $5,000 of assets managed for free so if
you have found this helpful and would like $5,000 managed for free please feel
free to use the referral link if you don't want to use mine that's perfectly
fine but I do strongly encourage you to go out and find somebody else's to use
because $5,000 managed for free is much better than nothing managed for free so
I have been Wanderer001 this has been my 3 year follow-up review of
wealthfront as an actual user with a fairly small
account depending on how you look at it so if you have any questions or comments
please feel free to leave them in the area below and as always thanks for
watching