Your Spare Change Should Be Saved, Not Invested

We all probably remember – or maybe some of you still have – the jar full of change that we would drop our coins into at the end of the day.  I remember as a kid lugging big jars full of change to my local bank, watching them clink around the coin counting machine, and walking out of the bank with cold hard cash.  It’s amazing to think that I had a couple hundred bucks sitting around in a jar!

This process of saving up small amounts is called microsaving.  Basically, doing a small amount of saving over time (such as gathering up your leftover change) can add up to a pretty decent chunk of money in the end.  Add up all your spare change over a year, and you can probably have yourself a couple hundred bucks without doing any work really.

I love microsaving!  I think it’s a great way to save a little bit of money into your pocket without even noticing it.   I don’t really use cash very often anymore, but I still collect my spare change.  I just don’t collect it in a jar.  Instead, there are a new wave of fintech apps that have hit the scene in the past few years that make it easy for you to save your spare change.  Think of them like a digital piggy bank.

The biggest player in the microsaving app world is probably an app called Acorns.  A lot of bloggers rave about it.  Basically, the app takes your spare change and invests it for you in a diversified portfolio.  Best of all, it has a tiny barrier to entry.  You only need $5 to get started investing.  That’s awesome, right!?

Well, it turns out its not very awesome at all.

Apps like Acorns have led me to the conclusion that your spare change should be saved, not invested.  What do I mean?

How Acorns Works.

The way Acorns works is pretty simple.  The app monitors your credit card transactions and rounds up each transaction to the nearest dollar.  It then takes that spare change and invests it into a diversified portfolio of low cost ETFs based on your risk tolerance, which is determined from your answers to a number of survey questions you answer when you set up your account.

So for example, if you buy something that is $1.50, Acorns will recognize that transaction and will pull 50 cents out of your bank account and invest it for you in a number of ETFs.  Once you reach $5 of spare change, it invests it for you.  Pretty simple and straightforward robo-advisor type service in a gorgeous app.  What’s the problem?

The Problem With Acorns.  Fees!

The problem is pretty simple and known to anyone who is interested in investing.  Keep fees low!

For accounts under $5000, Acorns “only” charges a management fee of $1 per month.  That’s nothing, right?

It’s not nothing!  It’s actually a ton of money!

If you’re paying $1 per month, that’s $12 per year.  Let’s say you’ve got $500 of your hard earned spare change invested in Acorns.  You’re now paying a management fee of 2.4% just for the privilege of having your spare change collected.  That’s ludicrous.

Here’s an example of the management fees you are paying depending on the amount invested in Acorns, in intervals of $500.

$500 = 2.4%

$1,000 = 1.2%

$1,500 = 0.8%

$2,000 = 0.6%

$2,500 = 0.48%

$3,000 = 0.4%

$3,500 = 0.34%

$4,000 = 0.3%

$4,500 = 0.26%

$5,000 and above = 0.25%

As you can see, the fees are extremely high when you’re in the $1000 range and still pretty high until you get to a couple thousand dollars invested.

So while the minimum is $5 to start, that really isn’t a realistic minimum.  In that first month, you’d pay 20% of your balance in fees.  And I thought CoinStar was a ripoff!

You really need to start off with probably at least $3,500 to be considered paying reasonable fees.  So why can’t you just do that?

If you imagine that you’re rounding up an average of 50 cents per transaction, how many transactions are you doing per month?  Even if you did 100 transactions per month (which would be about 3 a day, which seems really high to me), you’d only be investing $50 per month.  In year one, you’ve invested $600 dollars, and paid over 2% in management fees.  That’s just too high and it will take you a pretty long time to reach $3500 using just your spare change.  You’re throwing away your spare change to fees!

Couldn’t You Just Initially Put In More Money To Lower The Costs?

Sure you could just put in more money to start.  But isn’t the point of an app that collects your spare change to be able to start out with an empty jar and watch it fill up over time?

Also, if you’re using Acorns, I’m willing to wager you’re probably not using it because you want them to be your Robo-Advisor platform.  You’re probably really using it because you like the round-up feature and the idea of saving your spare change.

Finally, if you’ve got the money to put in several thousand dollars into an Acorns account, then I’d have to ask the question, is investing your spare change really enough for you to reach your goals?  You’re not going to get rich putting away $50 per month, no matter what anyone tells you.  The growth on that amount is just too small.

If you’re investing, you need to be saving much more than just your spare change.  Instead…

Save Your Spare Change.  Don’t Invest it.

I like the concept of microsaving, but your spare change is too small of an amount to realistically invest with it.  The real value of saving your spare change is to use it to help fund your short term goals, not as a way to bolster your investment portfolio.  That’s because investing isn’t free, it costs money.  When you’re investing your spare change, you’re just not putting enough money in for the returns to really outweigh the costs of investing.

You know what is free though?  A bank account (if you’re paying a fee for your bank account, please drop that account!)

The way I use my spare change is to fund my “sinking funds” accounts.  These are expenses that you know are coming up every single year.  Think of things like Christmas gifts, travel, insurance, parking tickets or other stupid mistakes you know you’ll make.  You know these things are coming.  Wouldn’t it be nice if you could use your spare change to pay for some of this stuff?

The app I use to save my spare change is called Qapital.  It has the exact same round up feature as Acorns, but instead of investing it, the money goes into an FDIC insured savings account.  It’s completely free and takes 10 minutes to sign up.  Every time I make a purchase using my credit card, Qapital rounds my purchase to the nearest dollar (exactly the same as Acorns), withdraws that spare change from my bank account, and puts it into an FDIC insured bank account.  Every couple of months, I take that money out (a hundred bucks or so at a time) and stick it in my emergency fund.  It costs me nothing and I still get the benefit of saving my spare change!

I was one of the early users of Qapital, so I get a tiny amount of interest on my savings.  I don’t think new users are receiving interest anymore.  Oh shucks, you lose out on a few cents!  Really, the interest doesn’t matter when you’re talking about your spare change, since you’d only be gathering a few bucks of interest per year in a standard high yield savings account anyway.  It also really doesn’t matter because you’re using your spare change to fund your sinking funds accounts, which should be set budget expenses that come up each year.  In other words, you’re using your spare change within a year anyway, so the interest doesn’t really matter.

I’ll have a more thorough post in the future about Qapital, why I recommend it for anyone who likes the concept of microsaving, and how I use it in my day to day life.  If you have any interest in opening up a Qapital account, feel free to use my referral link and we’ll both get $5.  If you’d rather not use my referral link, just go to Qapital’s website and see if it’s for you.

My Takeaways:

1. Your spare change can add up over time.
2. Management fees from microsaving apps, like Acorns, are way too high if you’re only investing your spare change.
3. Save your spare change and use it for regular annual expenses (your sinking funds accounts).  Don’t invest it.

Note: I don’t work for Qapital and have absolutely no affiliation with them.  I just discovered this app sometime last year and thought it was a superior alternative to Acorns for those of us that like rounding up our transactions and saving our spare change.  This post was inspired by a Twitter conversation I had with Super Millennial, who can be found at his terrific blog, supermillennial.com.

What do you think?  Do you invest your spare change or do you just save it?