Everyone should invest some money at some point in their life (earlier the better). This helps you achieve a certain degree or even full financial freedom so you can focus on other things with your precious time. However, we also know that the subject of investing–filtering through thousands of stocks in hundreds of stock markets around the world, choosing what stocks to invest in, monitoring performance, and all that might not be everyone’s cup of tea. In this case, you can either get the help of an investment agent or, better yet, invest on autopilot!

What is Investing on Autopilot?

If you are not one of those stock-market-savvy and investment-savvy individuals, you might want to consider investing on autopilot. This is where you put aside whatever money you can on a certain platform and they will do the rest for you. You just have to sit back and watch your money grow.

There are a few significant advantages of investing on autopilot over having your own stockbroker or an agent to manage your profile. For one, brokers are expensive, and most of them will have some sort of minimum money required to begin. In most autopilot investments, you can decide how much to invest–even as little as a few cents.

Some autopilot investors are actual bots (programmed software) that have the ability to learn about the stock market on their own. These bots will sweep through thousands of stocks and use predictive algorithms to determine future price changes and pick the best options for you. These are also known as Robo Advisors.

So, this is a very effective way to invest if you don’t want to get your feet wet in the chaos of the stock world.

Best 5 Ways to Invest Autopilot

There are many different platforms that allow you to invest on autopilot. The best example is your bank, most likely. They will have investment accounts where you can move funds between investment, savings, and chequing accounts easily. But usually, their management fee is quite high. So, we look for other solutions.

(1) M1 Finance

M1 Finance encapsulates all the good things we talked about auto-investing above. First and foremost it is completely free to invest your money and manage your portfolio (no management fees). You can invest any amount of money you can spare, yes even cents. M1 Finance allows either you to take control of your investments or let everything be automated. So, even at some point, you decide to take control of your portfolio, you can do so without changing platforms.

If you don’t have a lot of money, to begin with, do not worry. M1 Finance allows you to buy fractional shares–a part of a share so that you don’t have to pay full price. In comparison, big fund management companies such as Vanguard does not facilitate fractional share purchase or even automated investments.

Check out M1 Finance here.

(2) Acorns

We just love the concept behind Acorns investing platform. When you sign up with Acorns and link your credit card to the app, it will track your credit card usage. When you make a purchase using the credit card, it will round up the purchase to the nearest dollar and the difference will be automatically invested. For example, if you buy groceries for $51.20, the bill will be rounded up to $52, and the difference of $0.80 will be invested in your Acorns account. Neat!

There are also more options to invest faster if micro-investing is not for you. You can opt to invest multipliers of your transactions.

When it comes to the automation front, Acorns give you the option to fully automate your investments, or even semi-automate. You can select from their various risk portfolios–conservative, moderate, or aggressive.

The small catch with Acorns is that it costs $1 per month. This can seem like a pretty big amount for investing spare change. But, you will most likely you will not notice this.

Check out Acorns here.

(3) Betterment

Betterment prides itself on being one of the leaders of Socially Responsible Investing (SRI). While this has a lot of young investors interested in the platform, we are here for it all. Betterment allows you to start investing with as little as $10 and you can auto-everything thereafter.

A very user-friendly interface allows you to define your wealth goals such as student loan payoff, buying a house or a car, or a trip overseas. This will not only give your investments a sense of purpose but will also motivate you to invest more. But it is not all looks, depending on your goals, Betterment will recommend/adjust your portfolio (stocks, bonds, commodities) to reach your goals in the most optimal manner possible.

Check out Betterment here.

(4) Wealthfront

With over $25 billion in funds in management, Wealthfront is one of the biggest companies on our list. However, their pride and joy is the autopilot investing option along with some serious ability to take control of yourself as well.

If you choose to do so, you can pick your own stocks, ETFs, or even investment portfolios they have created for you. And they only charge you a 0.25% advisory fee per annum!

For this minimal fee, Wealthfront offers some great benefits such as automatic dividend reinvesting, tax-loss harvesting, and even automatic portfolio rebalancing (to match your investment goals). Just the benefits off of tax-loss harvesting can cover up for the minimal annual fee they charge.

(5) Wealthsimple Invest

Wealthsimple Invest for Canada has been a household name in investing for quite some time now. It has revolutionized investing with zero-commission trades.

Wealthsimple Invest is all-in for autopilot investing. Their Wealthsimple Invest is all about helping you grow your wealth to set financial goals. So, dividends will be reinvested automatically, the account will be rebalanced automatically, and you can harvest the power of spare-change investing much like Acorns above.

If you are concerned about social responsibility, they offer Social Responsible Investing (SRI) too. For the Muslim friends out there, they offer Halal investing too. You can even automate deposits based on how much money you need in the bank and opting to invest the extra cash automatically.

Check out Wealthsimple Invest here.

So, these are our best picks for investing on autopilot so that you don’t have to bury yourself in research into the stock market to achieve your financial goals. Let us know what you think of our list and let us know if you have any other recommendations.

Happy investing!