Wealthsimple Reviews - What Is It?

DO NOT USE Wealthsimple!!! You Must Read This Review!
Fully Researched: Price, User Feedback and More!

Wealthsimple is a new robo-advisor who deals with investing your money in exchange-traded funds and retirement accounts. With this robo-advisor, you will be able to invest your money in a socially responsible portfolio. Wealthsimple claims that it is very easy to use their app for investing money. They also say that their socially responsible portfolio prefers companies producing low carbon emissions and using cleantech innovations. The company's Crunchbase profile reports that Wealthsimple was founded in 2014 by Michael Katchen, an entrepreneur from Toronto. Katchen graduated from the University of Western Ontario with a business degree. The specialist was Ancestry.com's national director in Canada for about four months before he launched Wealthsimple in 2014.

In this review we will focus on the aspects of the app used by the investor. You will learn how to sign up for it; how Wealthsimple works, public opinions about it, as well as rates and fees you will have to pay. Let's find out how to sign up for Wealthsimple. At present it is available in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. You can sign up for it either via their app (available in the Google Play and iTunes stores) or their website. You'll need to choose the country you're in, your age, annual income, investment goals, current total of investments and savings, total value of your debts, total value of your assets, level of investment experience, how long you are going to hold onto your investments, if you would buy or sell during a downturn and whether you want socially responsible investments?

Customer Reviews - Does Wealthsimple Really Work?

Even though the company claims that the application process is very fast and easy, many customers do not agree with this claim. After answering a long list of questions you will need to click the "Start with This Plan" button at the page bottom and open your account. You will be asked for your name, email address and password. After filling out that section, you will be asked whether you want to open a traditional IRA, a personal investment account, Roth IRA or a 401(k). Let's say, you chose the personal account. You will provide your name, birthday, phone number, and country of citizenship. You will be asked for your place of work, your social security number, and whether you are employed by a stock exchange or FINRA member firm, etc. These questions are usually annoying for most customers but they are intended to meet federal standards, verify your identity and make sure that you will be a good investor. After giving them your social security number, your email address will be confirmed and you will be able start investing. What most customers appreciate about Wealthsimple is that an account can be set up with no need to provide any banking information. This also gives an opportunity to snoop around your account and get a feel for things before linking your bank accounts to your Wealthsimple account. Let's see how investing works with this company.

The work of Wealthsimple is very similar to that of other robo-advisors like Wealthfront and Betterment. You can choose how often you are going to deposit money into your investment account. Then you will have the option of to alter your investment strategy by choosing an option and let it ride. If you are new in using a robo-advisor you should think about allowing the company to run your investments through algorithms. This can be intimidating and risky, though. If you are not pleased with how your portfolio is performing o you have faced any losses or taxes; you can use automatic rebalancing and tax-loss harvesting. These features are not unique with Wealthsimple but they are common among other robo-advisors too. Let's focus on portfolio rebalancing for a moment. Portfolios have many moving parts and to keep them in line you will need to buy and sell, which may not be as easy as it seems. Wealthsimple has algorithms meant for monitoring your portfolio via something called portfolio rebalancing. They've got. The algorithm uses specific buy-and-sell patterns to keep your portfolio moving based on your preferences. With this buying and selling process you will certainly get some income on your trades. This profit has to be reported to the IRS. What if you are not making the trades? How do you know the tax consequences? The matter is that losing money can be beneficial for you. Wealthsimple solves these situations via tax loss harvesting, a special method of buying and selling that helps to avoid problems with taxes. Is this robo-advisor really a good way for investing? Let's find out by taking a look at the public opinion about this robo-advisor.

Generally speaking, Wealthsimple has got not so many customer reviews. HighYa contains only several testimonials of mixed character, while other expert personal finance websites have got a little more customer feedback. The main disadvantage of the tool is that its fees for accounts below $100,000 are two times higher than those of Wealthfront's and Betterment. One website pointed out that Betterment's website offers so much more learning tools than Wealthsimple does. We absolutely agree with this. Betterment's educational tools are just perfect. Let us take a look at some actual users' reviews about Wealthsimple.

"Wealthsimple has too high fees, even though this is far not the best robo-advisor in the industry. Some lower cost advisors provide better personal attention than Wealthsimple does. As a customer I don't think it is worth paying extra for and I cannot recommend this service."

"Wealthsimple is not the best digital investment manager for High Net Worth Individuals and advanced investors. If you know investment theory quite well and you can roll your asset allocation, this might not be the ideal fit for you. I cannot see any use of this expensive service, sometimes referred to as a robo-advisor."

"What I didn't like about wealthsimple is its human-assisted part. I had one issue and needed help immediately but I was not able to reach their customer service for a long period of time. When I finally had a chance to talk to one of their reps I did not receive a good advice. My question was about how to be more tax efficient."

My Final Summary

Wealthsimple has a lot of cons. Its main drawback is that the fees for investments below $100,000 are two times higher than those of popular competitors like Wealthfront and Betterment. Their fees are too high. The basic fee of 0.50% is rather high. Wealthfront and Betterment charge 0.25% for basic service, while Betterment offers premium services at 0.40%/year. Besides, the service comes with no goal setting. This feature is currently offered by Betterment, Wealthfront, and Personal Capital. One of the few advantages of Wealthsimple is that its website and platform are strong enough and are simple to use. You also don't have to provide your banking information in order to open an account. With these pros and cons, Wealthsimple cannot be recommended as the best robo-advisor. You might find better options over there.

Wealthsimple Pricing and Rates

You will be charged a 0.5% fee for your accounts with deposits of less than $100,000. Account with deposits above the $100,000 mark becomes a Wealthsimple Black account. It comes with a fee of 0.4%. For comparison, Betterment's fee for accounts with balances below $100,000 is 0.25%, while the fee for accounts above $100K is 0.04%-0.05%. Wealthfront charges 0.25% for accounts over $10,000. There is no fee for accounts with balances under that point.