Stash Review (2024)

Account Setup

Stash makes the account sign-up process simple and straightforward. As you begin onboarding, you’ll enter personal information and have the opportunity to select the first stock you’d like to invest in from a menu. You also have flexibility to save the investment selection until later in the process. When selecting goals, Stash provides six options including retirement, budgeting, saving for the unexpected, building wealth, earning stock rewards, and financial advice. Once goals are selected you’ll be prompted to pick the subscription plan and add a credit card to enroll.

Stash’s subscription-based model is rare within the robo-advisor industry, as most providers charge a fee percentage for the assets held on the platform. Stash offers two subscription options; Growth and Stash+. Stash Growth is a $3 monthly subscription that includes digital advice tailored towards new investors, a personal investment account, Stock-Back card access, the option to utilize early payday, digital advice for personal finances, a smart portfolio, and a retirement portfolio. Stash+ is the premier tier for $9 per month. It includes everything on the Growth tier supplemented with digital advice for family finances, market insights, and two kids' portfolios. Both tiers also include life insurance, but the coverage is not significant.

The subscription plan determines which accounts you can open. Overall, Stash offers a relatively limited number of investment account types, including personal brokerage, traditional individual retirement account (IRA), Roth IRA, and custodial. After you’ve chosen the subscription plan, you can link your bank account to invest with Stash. Before your funds are invested, you’ll be able to view your allocation to ensure you’re comfortable with the portfolio. Stash also provides a diversification analysis tool that evaluates how well your self-selected investments are diversified on the platform.

Goal Planning

Stash provides several goal-planning options to choose from, including:

• Retirement
• Building Wealth
• Saving for the Unexpected
• Budgeting
• Earn Stock Rewards

Stash generally lacks financial calculators and tools that help you assess your goal-planning progress. However, you can educate yourself about a variety of goal-planning best practices through Stash’s Learn portal, which covers a broad range of investment and financial planning topics. This information isn’t specific to your financial situation, but many of the articles may generally be relevant to your goal profile.

Another way to evaluate your goal progress is through Stash’s diversification analysis tool, which gives you further insight into your portfolio allocation and the opportunity to receive investment recommendations based on your portfolio makeup. There are also “Potential” and “Idea” sections of your account that allow you to adjust a few financial levers to explore potential outcomes. Stash is purely digital, so there are no human financial advisors to assist with planning.

Account Services

Stash provides bank services that can help you to more effectively manage your money in one place. One of the unique features of Stash’s bank account is a Stock-Back card that gives you a percentage of your spending back in the form of stock instead of the more standard cash-back option. This allows you to set aside further funds for investing without more money coming out of your pocket.

Stash also supports auto deposits and round-up transfers through its Auto-Stash tool. You’ll be able to use these funds to place trades for stocks and ETFs in four daily trading windows. As mentioned, advice is digitally delivered throughout the product in the form of educational articles curated from the information you share on the platform. Human advisors are not available for consultations. Since Stash is built for uncomplicated investing, margin accounts are also not offered as part of the platform.

Cash Management

Within Stash’s Smart Portfolio, automatic sweeps into the portfolio occur once cash exceeds $1. Money market funds are not offered, and this makes sense as the balance of cash will never be large enough to generate much in terms of interest given the active sweep into the market portfolio. As part of the banking product, Stash gives you more control over your cash flow by offering mobile deposits and budgeting tools. You’ll also have access to the early direct deposit feature for your paycheck, which creates more financial flexibility by allowing you to manage these funds up to two business days ahead of when you might normally expect to receive the money.

Portfolio Construction

Stash provides the option to select your own investments or to use its fully managed service, Smart Portfolio. If you’re looking to create your own allocation, you’ll find that the investment catalog is large, allowing you to choose from nearly 4,000 stocks, ETFs, and real estate investment trusts (REITs). You can also take advantage of fractional share investing for more investment options.

The Smart Portfolio is built by Stash’s investment research team and generally follows a passive, risk-optimized approach to building wealth. The portfolio features a sliding scale to adjust the risk level to your preferences, goals, and financial situation. The asset allocation is invested in ETFs and is broadly invested across domestic, international, and bond holdings. In January 2022, Stash added crypto as part of its Smart Portfolio diversification strategy but dropped it in 2023 as Stash leaned further into passive investing principles.

Smart Portfolio is Stash's robo-advisor, and it is limited to ETFs as the asset used. Investors can access a fuller range of assets in the self-directed accounts, but that is outside of the robo-advisor program.

Available Assets