Spare change can get pretty annoying. If you’re like a lot of people, you’ll let it pile up in your pocket until one day you unload it all on some poor convenience store clerk to pay for a six-pack of beer and a bag of chips. However, a soon-to-be-released smartphone app called Acorns has come up with a solution to this problem: It will let you automatically invest any spare change you have into a diversified portfolio.
In a Mashable article on the app published a couple of months ago, Acorns cofounder Jeff Cruttenden explains how the app “simulates” producing spare change from credit card purchases by rounding your total up to the nearest dollar and investing the leftover amount into your portfolio. The app was designed to make saving and investing as unobtrusive as possible — instead of making sure to set aside regular savings from your paycheck, you can just use on the app to generate a constant stream of small savings every time you buy something with it.
The fee for using the service will be 1% of what you earn through your portfolio and on top of that it will charge you a flat fee of $1 per month for using it. That said, if it helps you save and grow money, it could easily be worth it. The app is set to launch sometime this quarter and you can sign up for news alerts for both the iOS and Android versions of it by going to Acorns’ homepage.
