Since starting my micro-investing journey in Raiz at the beginning of February 2021 it’s time to take a peek and see how things have been chugging along.
Overall I’ve been quite happy with the Raiz service and would seriously recommend the service to anyone who is starting their investing journey and is somewhat intimidated by shares and ETF’s.
Even though 2021 was another turbulent year the Raiz investment app worked well behind the scenes on my transactional accounts by investing the change of each transaction.
The performance of my investment can easily be seen in this handy little graph displayed within the app:
You’ll notice from this performance chart that the majority of the balance has been from the round-up investments ($312.87) about 95% of the total portfolio value.
The next component of the portfolio, as detailed in the screen capture above, was the market return, which includes the dividends on the right, and represented the other 5% of the portfolio.
The last component of the portfolio is the Rewards. This was a handy feature where purchases using Raiz’s coupons (of sorts) are redeemed for money invested into your portfolio.
Do be mindful it can take awhile for these credits to land into your portfolio.
Another aspect within the app that may help to determine whether your investing rate will make much of a difference is the Future performance of your portfolio. Here is what that looks like in the app:
This can help to determine whether you need to increase the level of your investing if you’re looking to achieve a desired result at a certain age.
The other aspect on this portfolio view is tapping on the Past. Tapping on this option at the top shows the activity that has happened. Here is the most recent activity on my portfolio at the time of writing:
The Buy transactions are the round-ups that have been captured from my transactional account.
How To Close Raiz Account
To stop the capture of round-ups from your bank disconnect your bank from the Raiz app. Simply tap on the Round-Ups section and disconnect your bank accounts from this screen.
After you’ve disconnected your bank account, go back to the main home screen and apply the same process in the Recurring section too. Simply cancel any active recurring investments.
Once you’ve stopped any roundups and recurring investments the last step is tapping the Withdraw button on the home page.
Upon tapping this option set the total amount to withdraw as the current balance of the account, like so:
You’ll be prompted with the above window informing you that the withdrawal and remittance of your funds will take 5 business days.
Next, you’ll need to confirm where these funds will be remitted to:
As I have our transactional account already connected into the app Raiz offers the choice of sending funds to my account or an option to send it to my Super account (which I don’t have with Raiz).
Finally there’s one last prompt to make sure you really really want to withdraw your funds:
After confirming the withdrawal Raiz will perform the final calculations and send through the closing balance.
Things I Liked About Raiz
There are several aspects I liked about using the Raiz app, these included:
- Ease to get started using your phone.
- Ease of being able to frequently reinvest throughout the year.
- Options available to invest. The ability to customise your allocation was very nice, although expensive considering I was only investing my change.
- Ease of end of year tax reporting. The tax report from Raiz made it easy to see where items needed to be listed on my income tax return.
- Communication is frequent and they often report on what your investing is like compared to others.
- Ease of being able to invest in Bitcoin.
Things I Didn’t Like About Raiz
While there was much good about Raiz there are a couple of things I thought could be improved.
The most notable was the cost. At $3.50 per month it’s very affordable, but for those just testing the water by doing round-ups it might be best if Raiz looked at a more affordable fee structure for those with portfolio balances below a certain amount.
While I made around $13 for around 12 months of investing, if we take off the $3.50 per month during the 11 full months this equates to a cost of $38.50 and a loss of $25.50.
I don’t expect Raiz to change this fee as its already very affordable. It just means if you want to get started it would greatly assist your portfolio if you have a sizeable deposit and you add a recurring deposit (I didn’t to both of these).
Lastly, add an option to exclude transfers in the My Finance section as funds transferred between my credit card and bank account would often show that I’m going backwards with my money.
Summary
If you’re looking to automate your investing and want a good app to help monitor and manage how you invest then Raiz is an excellent option to get started.
To make it worthwhile start with a reasonable investment and if possible look to add a recurring investment alongside your round-up investments.
