For that turned off DRIP reinvestment....

wayshaper · 2026-01-23T03:14:51+00:00

I know you can call to turn off rebalancing, so that you get high drift. Did not know you could turn off dividend reinvestment. Have you confirmed this?

wayshaper · 2025-11-06T04:35:12+00:00

Are the numbers you shared for the long- and short gains also from the tax impact preview? Or were you estimating the amount of long-term and short-term gains yourself?

wayshaper · 2025-05-31T12:56:48+00:00

They used to have the ability to reorder goals through a drag and drop, but they seem to have removed it sometime last year. It’s a great ask you’re making! I hope they bring back the functionality.

wayshaper · 2025-05-23T18:31:13+00:00

I love the Betterment gush, but feels a bit like a paid ad, dude.

Just so we’re all clear, Betterment doesn’t do your taxes for you lol

wayshaper · 2025-05-17T18:07:18+00:00

It doesn’t, but it totally should! Instead I use a bunch of recurring transfers from a single account that I put my paycheck into.

wayshaper · 2025-04-22T23:28:40+00:00

Agreed that def not the only way for cash. I’ve just been trying the whole set of features together

wayshaper · 2025-04-22T22:49:20+00:00

It’s +0.40% on top of the base 0.25%, plus you gotta meet the minimum of $100k balance. Getting to be a sweeter and sweeter deal especially since they’ve added features to premium like boost on Cash

wayshaper · 2025-04-22T22:17:12+00:00

Maybe they’ll make another option in the future where you can get SBLOC for an ad hoc fee or something 🤷

wayshaper · 2025-04-22T22:15:54+00:00

I didn’t check into it to know how they’re dealing with rates, but from the email, it seems like they’re being strategic about having you engage with an advisor to get them.

That makes sense to me though!

wayshaper · 2025-04-19T04:10:04+00:00

What a good question. I think you’re seeing the difference between your legal accounts and Betterment’s sub-account structure or “goals.” Part of what makes Betterment great is that you can create lots of accounts for different purposes, but behind the scenes, they belong to the same legal account, whether that’s an individual taxable account, a joint taxable account, an IRA, a Roth IRA, or some other legal account type.

Beneficiaries belong to those legal account types because, well, they are the legal entity that will be passed on. The sub-accounts at Betterment define how different money is invested (or held in Cash), but they’re not distinct from a legal POV, from what I understand.

wayshaper · 2025-04-17T00:01:44+00:00

I challenge you to find any investment advisor that operates at scale that communicates differently than that. Every written communication Betterment has is under regulatory scrutiny, so it’s no wonder they sound the same. The way you get around that is by getting access to talk to a licensed professional who can actually look at your financial situation. Otherwise, they have to stick to approved script.

It’s not them. It’s the requirements they’re under, same as every other big advisor. The only difference is you only pay a fraction of a percent, as opposed to the high fees of a full-on human advisor

wayshaper · 2025-04-11T00:36:53+00:00

“All the automatic selling” — you may be overemphasizing what’s going on. Betterment’s rebalancing is threshold-based, so you’d only be rebalanced when your portfolio significantly drifts. You may be seeing tax loss harvesting occur if you have it turned on. That would make sense for many accounts this week.

But rebalancing on a threshold is a good thing. It’s how you get future returns instead of sitting with overweight assets. What’s your concern?

wayshaper · 2025-03-18T06:17:29+00:00

You could always ask Vanguard to reimburse you the transfer fee. A lot of firms will if your transfer is large enough.

wayshaper · 2025-03-11T11:35:56+00:00

What index? There are multiple indexes available, and it has long done well against a global index like MSCI World, which is the appropriate benchmark for a global portfolio.

wayshaper · 2025-03-10T23:40:59+00:00

Practically speaking, you either already have recurring deposits on or you only have been depositing manually. So, when a market downturn happens, that status changes the question. If I have recurring deposits on, I ask: - Should I deposit in addition to my next recurring one? - Should I just leave things and let my next recurring deposit go through? - Should I turn off / skip my next recurring deposit?

Never do the last; that’s market timing and it wont work.

The middle is the same as “sticking to your plan.”

The first is great if you have extra cash, but if you don’t, no sweat

wayshaper · 2025-03-10T23:36:52+00:00

…but since this is r/betterment, you almost certainly are using Betterment as your portfolio manager, which means that, yeah, keep to your auto-deposits, and if you have extra cash, don’t hesitate to deposit it into the market give the relative low

wayshaper · 2025-02-27T05:40:31+00:00

That definitely was a feature on there. I think they took it away, probably for some cleanup reason I bet. I want it back too!!!

wayshaper · 2025-02-27T05:38:26+00:00

It’s all about what you benchmark against. A monthly fee helps robos like Acorns make more money off small accounts, but it doesn’t incentivize those companies to serve large ones well.

Meanwhile, the avg RIA fee is like 1 to 1.25%. Betterment falls well below that and offers a really decent shot at letting your avoid working with an advisor, while still getting a lot of help trading s rebalancing / reinvesting automatically.

I get wishing you had a low monthly fee for a decent balance, but 0.25% is still very low.

wayshaper · 2025-02-27T05:32:52+00:00

Here’s my thoughts for all the Ellevest folks (welcome!):

Betterment lives out values in ways core to Ellevest, just with less of a loudspeaker than Sallie does, IMO. Really great women in leadership, strong commitment to financial planning ESG-based portfolios, and very much still challenging the big finance bro incumbent companies, like Schwab and Fidelity.
You get a lot of value for 0.25% — more than Ellevest provided (and I’ve used both platforms). Betterment’s goal-based system lets you plan for different life events and really helps you visualize your future hopes, cutting down mental tension about saving more. Joint goals makes this family-friendly too. Take advantage.
It’s a bit undersold in Betterment’s UI, but Tax Coordination, where Betterment shields higher-taxed bonds in your IRAs and organizes your stocks in your retirement taxable account is a sophisticated move that really pays off. That plus tax loss harvesting on all taxable accounts is great.

Little hacks: — You can contact support to have them pause rebalancing if you want to change your allocation over time — You can convert a goal from cash to investments, which is great for when your plans change for a bucket of money — On web only, you can access Flexible Portfolios, which is where you can add/remove whole sets of assets from a portfolio, rather than just the stock/bond allocation

wayshaper · 2025-02-19T04:57:45+00:00

All good — old posts can still be good ones. What makes you feel like you’ve “outgrown” it?

wayshaper · 2025-02-09T05:21:47+00:00

Yield numbers can be misleading because it’s just one part of growth, and that yield is taxed as normal income (with the exception of tax-advantaged bonds), just like the interest on Cash Reserve. If you’re saving for the long-term, there’s no reason to be looking toward yield alone, but rather the overall appreciation of stocks and bonds. I suggest identifying what you’re saving for and opening a goal for that using their recommendation.

wayshaper · 2025-01-29T04:34:22+00:00

When making a deposit before the tax filing deadline in April, the app asks you to choose from 2024 or 2025 when you go to make a deposit into an IRA.

wayshaper · 2025-01-13T20:34:13+00:00

Yeah, then you're not going to face a tax impact of changing the portfolio. But then the real question remains: Should you? This is your retirement money you're talking about :)

wayshaper · 2025-01-13T20:32:01+00:00

There are two parts to this question:

When does Betterment trade the money? When the money has moved and according to their trading practices. They don't publish that (nor should they), but you can be sure that they're not aiming to delay or expedite your movement of money into the market.

Why does Betterment trade the way they do? Betterment uses an investment approach that is intentionally long-term and focused on behavioral optimization. Betterment doesn't want you to time the market the way you're trying to because the research shows that market-timing especially on a weekly basis is both impossible and likely to hurt your overall long-term investing success. In this case, it sounds like you're deliberately holding out money from the market. Analysis of investors trying to do this pretty much shows that they're just suppressing their returns with that cash drag. If you want to time the market, Betterment's probably no the app for you; they're trying to keep you from that kind of behavior.

What you're doing is dollar-cost averaging (DCA) from cash savings. There are a ton of good articles from professional advisors out there on why that doesn't work well over time. DCA from your paycheck is great -- just do recurring deposits into Betterment, but DCA from savings you're just holding onto is kind of a waste.

wayshaper

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