 There are so many freaking investing apps out there. I've tried out almost all of them and today I'm gonna tell you guys the ones that I think are the best. I'm also gonna break down which ones I think are best for different types of investments and different types of people. And there's so many different ways to invest out there. There's so much information out there. And so I decided that I would make this video in order to clear things up. And as always, I'm going to remind you to never forget to smash the living daylights out of the like button in order to defeat the evil YouTube algorithm. This is the second time that I recorded this video cause for some reason my camera stopped working all of a sudden. So let's jump in right now. Hopefully it works this time. That would be great. First one on the list is going to be Acorns. So I'm gonna keep all of these descriptions very general and short. So basically what Acorns does is you hook up your debit card to the app and then you go to the convenience store and you buy yourself a Slurpee for let's say $3.50. So what it does is it rounds that up to $4 and it invests the additional 50 cents directly into your brokerage account. This is an account that doesn't take very long to sign up for. It's incredibly easy. Probably takes five to 10 minutes or so. And overall out of all the different investing methods I think this one might be the easiest all things taken into account. Everything is done automatically for you after the initial setup and that only takes like 10 minutes. So if you're someone who's new to investing and you're too afraid to do the investing yourself I think this one is a great option for you. I know the idea behind this one resonates with a lot of people and that's why they end up trying it. Now overall they do charge you about $1 a month and that probably doesn't sound like a lot but think about it how much spare change do you have every month in your purchases? You probably only have maybe let's say $25 worth of spare change. And so $1 a month ends up being like a 4% fee which is well above the industry standard. So I don't think this one is realistic for you to invest with in the long term but I think it is a very cool concept and if it gets you to start investing this is kind of like a gateway drug I guess you could say I'm probably gonna get demonetized for saying that but this is kind of like a gateway drug into investing. It's super easy at first and then you can move on to better ones later on. Overall I'm gonna go ahead and put Acorn investing into C tier. Betterment is next on the list and this one is technically what's known as a robo advisor and a robo advisor is basically where it automatically makes the investments for you based off of algorithms and different signals from around the internet. These investments are made with very little to no human intervention and because of that they don't have to hire a huge team of different financial experts and they're able to theoretically pass along those savings to you. Now I've talked about this before on my channel but I don't fully trust robo advisors just because of the fact that they're so new. I like the idea behind a robo advisor but I think that I need to wait a little bit of time and just see kind of how things carry out before I decide to actually put a significant amount of money in an app that uses a robo advisor. Now if you don't feel the same way I would say that betterment is one of the better robo advisors out there although I think there are a few on this list that might be just as good if not a little bit better but I'll go ahead and put betterment into B tier. Next on the list is going to be M1 finance and this one is really interesting because they're basically a hybrid between a robo advisor and a traditional brokerage and a lot of people like M1 finance because it's a really good combination of the automation that comes with a robo advisor and the savings or the theoretical savings anyways and then a little bit more control than you would have if you invested with something like betterment. Now like many of them on this list they have very low fees or zero fees and I think that M1 finance had the least amount out of all of them on the list but I think if you look at the fees at this point they're all pretty much zero or close to zero. I'm only gonna mention the ones that don't have the best fee structure. So for instance, I mentioned acorns didn't have a very good fee structure just because of the fact that $1 a month ends up being quite a bit but honestly M1 finance might be the dark horse on this list because I do think that they're either going to do really well in the future if the robo advisor thing kind of takes off but they also might crash and burn as well. I have used them and I do like the direction that they're going with the company. It seems like they have a customer first mindset and so this one is going to rank the highest out of all the robo advisors that I talk about. I'm gonna go ahead and put it into A tier. Mint.com is going to be next on the list and this one is probably gonna surprise you. Now some of you might know that I have made a video about Mint in the past where I basically just go over how you can use Mint as a budgeting app and out of all the ones on this list I've used Mint for the longest. I've really loved using it over the years. It's such an easy way for you to keep a budget and basically the way it works without going into too much detail is you attach all of your credit cards, debit cards and bank accounts into Mint. Then it automatically tracks your purchases as well as how much money is going in and out of your accounts and then it will automatically categorize those purchases in different categories. So for instance, if you buy something from a grocery store it'll probably put that in the food category. Your monthly Netflix subscription would probably go in the entertainment category and so on and so forth. It also uses AI to create an even better experience. So for instance, there's some things that could be a little bit ambiguous like let's say you go on a night out with your friends and you end up buying a drink. That could either go in the eating out category like going to restaurants or it could go in the entertainment category. So basically things like that you'll choose it a few times and then it automatically kind of gets to know your personality and how you want things to be categorized. And then after a few months you probably won't have to change anything at all. Now I was really loving this service for the longest time. It was amazing. And then all of a sudden I started having a ton of technical issues. My cards were getting disconnected and then I would try to reconnect them and it wouldn't work. And then one time I got a new credit card I tried to connect it and it just would not work at all. Even though I had another credit card with the same exact company that worked just fine I tried calling their customer service line and it sent me on this giant wild goose chase. I had to call the parent company into it and I had to talk to their customer service and then they sent me back to the original ones and then they sent me to someone else and I just could not get the issues resolved. Eventually after looking into it and doing a bunch of research I realized that the parent company into it basically stopped providing support for Mint and they focused a lot more of their resources on their other product which is known as QuickBooks. Now QuickBooks can basically do the same thing for Mint. It's kind of like Mint except for businesses but it actually does cost money. I didn't want to pay anything for their service and they were basically trying to upsell me to get the problem fixed and I decided to just not use them at all. I looked up other reviews online and other people are having the same exact problem I was so until Mint gets this problem fixed they're pretty much unusable and that is extremely unfortunate because I loved using their product for the longest time. This hurts me to do it but I'm gonna have to put Mint into F tier. Now after I stopped using Mint I started looking for other products that could potentially replace the service that Mint provided and what I found that I thought was the best was actually personal capital and that's the next one on the list. So personal capital is not necessarily a budgeting app first like Mint but they do offer a budgeting option and to me I think it's good enough. It's not quite the same as Mint. It's not quite as detailed but overall I think it's pretty good. They also have 24 seven customer support and I made sure to test it out and they actually do have legitimate customer support. On top of that they are integrating a ton of other services into their app such as retirement planning, helping you to invest and all that sort of thing. I really like the direction that this company is heading. It's extremely user friendly and just ridiculously easy to sign up for and use. I haven't noticed any technical difficulties or anything like that with them and I'm really liking this service and I hope they keep up their high standard of quality. Right now I'm gonna have to put them into S tier. Next one on the list is going to be Robinhood and this is one of the OGs of the app investing world. Before Robinhood came along the brokerages were charging ridiculous fees for people who didn't have very much money. So for instance there were some brokerages that would charge you $4.95 for you to buy $100 stock. So that's not a big deal if you're investing like $100,000 or $200,000. It doesn't even, you know, you don't even notice it. But if you're a small player, someone who's just getting into the stock investing game, $4.95 on $100 stock is like half a year's worth of interest. Then Robinhood burst onto the scene and they changed the game forever. First of all, it was a $0 trading minimum. So even if you just wanted to invest like five bucks you could do that. Second of all, there's basically no fees involved in investing. Third, the platform is ridiculously easy to use and they actually make it extremely fun as well. And then the last thing is they will actually give you free stocks in order to get you to start investing. And all of this is on a very user friendly platform that probably takes 10 minutes to set up. Now the combination of all these things have basically created something where hundreds of thousands if not millions of people have started investing on Robinhood that never would have if they didn't exist. And the difference between starting to invest when you're let's say 18 versus starting to invest when you're in your 30s or 40s is gonna be like hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars worth of difference by the time you retire. So the fact that they have gotten so many people to start investing that wouldn't have otherwise means they have made a huge positive impact on the entire personal finance world. Now since then all of the other companies have been forced to kind of copy Robinhood. They've all dropped their fees to a very low minimum. Many of them are either $0 for everything or very close to that. And honestly if you have been investing for a while there are better services out there overall. But if you're a beginner I would say Robinhood is one of the best services out there and I just have a lot of respect for them for what they've done for the personal finance world in general. Robinhood is definitely S tier. If you haven't gotten your free stocks already what are you waiting for? Next on the list is going to be Stash. Now when I first heard about Stash I honestly thought it was kind of stupid. What they do is they basically ask you a bunch of questions about what you believe in and what you want to invest in and then they create a portfolio for you based off of the things that you kind of believe in and the things that you can really get behind. Now to me I'm kind of just like more analytical and practical with these sorts of things so I would just simply invest in whatever gives me the best return and that's why I invest in index funds. But after thinking about this for a while I realized that this is a genius marketing strategy and it's a really good idea overall. I had a friend who kind of thought of investing as kind of like greedy and icky and it's something that only rich people do but then she heard about the Stash investing app and it got her really excited because there were some things that she really believed in that she wanted to put some money behind and so she started investing just because of the Stash app and I thought that was really interesting. So let's say you think that augmented or virtual reality is gonna blow up in the next 10 or 20 years. You could put that into the Stash investing app and then it will invest in companies that are related to that entire niche. Or let's say that you only want to invest in companies that are green and eco-friendly or something along those lines. You can tell that to the app and they will only invest in companies that fit that category. Overall I'm not sure you're gonna get the best returns with this one but I do think that it is just a really good idea overall and so for that reason it's kind of another dark horse candidate in my opinion. I'm gonna go ahead and put it into B tier status. Next one on the list is going to be Titan and basically what they do is they kind of market their app as a hedge fund for the normal person like kind of just the normal everyday person. Now traditionally hedge fund investing has been reserved for only people that have a lot of money to invest and technically this app isn't a hedge fund it's more of an algorithmic trading app. So I think it's kind of funny that they advertise themselves that way but you know whatever. It's a cool idea overall and from what I've read they do tell you why they're investing in certain companies and not investing in other companies and these are people who are extremely experienced they're basically you know finance professionals people who could potentially be hedge fund managers. So I think the value in this one is if you're someone who wants to get really serious about finance and investing maybe you want to open up your own company in the future maybe you wanna become a hedge fund manager. I think this app is one of the best options out there for you because you would probably learn a lot from it. Now I did notice a few things about this app and their marketing and stuff that kind of annoys me. For one they claim that their all time performance is 3% higher than the S&P 500 index fund and that's completely hypothetical because they've only been around for a few years. So they do go on to explain that this is just a hypothetical thing where they kind of just took data points from the past and then they modeled those data points into the future and then they say that you know if we were to have invested with our plan algorithmically in the past we would have beat the S&P 500 by 3%. I do not buy that because study after study has shown that past performance does not predict future performance. In fact there might be a negative correlation so if a fund has done really well in the past there's a very good chance that it's not going to do nearly as well in the future. It's kind of just like gravity what goes up must come down at some point and you see companies do this all the time where they will create a bunch of different funds like probably a thousand of them and then they cherry pick the ones that do really well. Those are the ones they put on all their marketing material and all that sort of things and they do the promotional stuff and the marketing using just those funds that performed really well. But the problem here is is that 90 to 95% of managed funds do not beat a simple index fund from the S&P 500. So for that reason I think it's a really cool idea. It's a good value proposition especially if you want to learn how to evaluate different stocks. But overall I'm gonna go ahead and put this one in C tier. Next one on the list is going to be Weeble and this one is very similar to Robinhood and in fact they are huge competitors. Now they offer pretty much all of the same stuff that Robinhood offers and if they don't do it right now then they probably will within the next year or so. But I think that Weeble actually has one thing that beats out Robinhood just a little bit. If you invest just $100 into Weeble they will give you two free stocks valued at up to $1400. That is just an insane offer. A lot of people who wouldn't have invested otherwise again invested just because of the fact that they gave that incentive. And overall Weeble is really user friendly. I love the way they design the app. So I'm gonna go ahead and put Weeble in S tier right next to Robinhood. Wealthfront is next on the list and I kind of have a love hate relationship with them. Up to a few months ago I was using them and I was really loving it. Basically they did this promotional offer where they gave 2.5% interest on their savings account. And so I decided to invest my entire emergency fund into their account. 2.57% is extremely good for a savings account. Like I don't think anybody has ever done any better than that. That's almost as good as a bond pretty much. And of course bonds you can't access for years. Then all of a sudden this whole pandemic thing happened and they dropped it from 2.57% to 0.35. 0.35% is well below the industry standard. And I get it, I get it. A bunch of the other companies also dropped their interest rates but I don't think many of them dropped it that low. It seems like Wealthfront just basically decided to drop it to one of the lowest out of all of the online savings accounts. Now I'm hoping this is just a temporary thing and after the whole pandemic is over they're gonna raise it back up to what it was before because they offer a bunch of other really cool services. Basically it's just a Wealth management account as well and then if you want to invest with them they use a Robo Advisor. I really like how they integrated all of these services together. I was loving this app so much until they dropped the savings account interest and I really hate it when companies do that. It feels like I'm getting marketed to like I got tricked. Like it was kind of a bait and switch. They offered me a certain amount and they got me to buy into their product and then they take that away from me. To me that makes me kind of lose trust in them but I'm giving them a pass this time just because of what happened, this whole thing that's happening in the world. This is another one where I could be ranking at a lot lower this time next year or if they recover and they continue to provide really good service I might end up ranking them higher. But overall I'm gonna go ahead and put Wealthfront in A tier this time. Next one on the list is going to be YNAB also known as You Need a Budget. Now when Mint stopped working this was another one that I kind of started to look into because it kind of is what it says. It's basically a budgeting app. I didn't end up actually using them and here's why. Basically I was looking into them and it seemed like it was a super hardcore budgeting app. Like they got extremely detailed with stuff and you know if I'm gonna get really detailed with something I'll just use a spreadsheet or I can even just use like a pen and paper in real life. There's no need for me to use an app if I'm gonna get that detailed because the entire point of using a budgeting app in my opinion is to just save time and for convenience. And I have used these really detailed methods in the past and they worked really well for me but I think at some point when you've got your budget you know kind of sorted out you don't need to be that detailed anymore but I have to say YNAB has a ton of people all over the internet that really love it and they absolutely swear by it. There's people that make like hour long YouTube videos about their favorite ways of using it but I just cannot bring myself to justify using it especially since it costs about $12 a month. I don't know I'm just, I'm not the type of person that wants to you know count every single cent and just save like a few dollars here and there. And this seems like one of those apps where they just spend a ton of time making sure that every tiny little thing is good and I would rather just take that time and either you know invest it into making YouTube videos or I could just work more or I can just do things that I like to do. Now I think one of the reasons why it has such a huge following is the fact that when you end up paying for something there's kind of just this thing inside of you where you're like I need to get my money's worth so you actually use it. Whereas a lot of the time if someone signs up for Med for instance they're like eh it was free so I probably am not even gonna use it and then they just end up forgetting about it. I don't know I could be wrong about this one let me know if I'm wrong about it in the comments I do admit that I never actually used it so I'm gonna go ahead and put this one into D tier. Check out my other videos right here I made them just for you. Go ahead smash the like button hit the subscribe button, ring the notification bell comment down below any thoughts, comments, criticisms, et cetera or any other apps you thought should have been on the video or what you think about the apps that are on the video. Thank you so much for watching and bye for now.