Has anyone tried investing with Stash ? It seems similar to Betterment and Wealthfront.
The fees on those accounts are crazy. If you only have a $1000 in your account (as an example), it's 1.2%/year. If you have $5,000+ it is 0.25%/year. A simple index fund through vanguard (found on many 401k plans) is usually 0.1%. As my boy Yeezus noted above, Robinhood is the way to go. Just invest in the Vanguard ETFs.
Benefit of the robo-advisors is they do automatic monthly contributions to the balanced portfolio. They give you an assortment of funds (could be few or many, based on your risk tolerance) automatically, without the user having to worry about trading/re-balancing
That's fair. So my advice would be to never do it if you are investing less than $5,000 (based on the fee schedule above). However, Vanguard also provides balance mutual funds based on retirement date (similar to what robo-advisors do), and they disclose the mix of vanguard funds/ETFs used to make them. You could easily take that information, create your own targeted retirement portfolio on Robinhood, and rebalance quarterly (most robo-advisors are monthly or quarterly). Maybe not worth the time on a small balance, but on a large balance, the difference in fees between .25 to ~.10-.15 could have a large impact. Plus, you get to learn. Also just learned that vanguard is free when trading vanguard ETFs (not sure about mutual funds), so would definitely recommend that route as well.
Stash doesn't seem to do tax loss harvesting like Betterment or WF. And do don't reinvest dividends automatically where it makes sense (funds that became underweight). I think I will stick for the better and cheaper Betterment!
Why not just manage your own funds with Robinhood? No fees. You can invest in index funds or more complex structures too.