By Clayton Daniel of Fund Your Ideal Lifestyle

As Raiz ticks over the first twelve months of a successful campaign to engage Australian’s with their money, I wanted to circle back around to see if you benefited. To see if you were in the market, or out of the market.

See Raiz simply holds your investments for you. And I say ‘simply’ on purpose. As a former financial adviser who built a career around investing millions of dollars, I can tell you – how the money is invested is usually the hard part. But thankfully it’s all now at the tip of your fingers.

So over the last twelve months – the market went UP. Great result for everyone invested. But were you invested, or were you ‘trying to get a better return’ someplace else?

A big misconception with Raiz is that they are an investment – which they aren’t. The investments that sit within the Raiz investment structure (the app on your phone) hold investments called ETFs. In a nutshell, these ETFs go up if the market goes up, and down if the market goes down.

Really simple stuff.

So again I ask – did you invest, or did you miss out?

Do the markets go up all the time? Of course not. But do they go up more than the go down? Yes – that’s because our economy keeps growing, and companies like Commonwealth bank and Woolworths keep making a profit. And as long as our economy keeps growing, and our companies keep making profits, the market will continue to go up.

I’ve had my account for around nine months now. And I’m happy with how the market went. Again, the result wasn’t created by Raiz – but they gave me the opportunity to access growth over the last nine months. Check out the screen capture below:

Did I make life changing money?

No.

But would I make life changing money in any retail investment in less than twelve months?

No.

So why am I such a big fan of this non-life changing money?

Because I didn’t think about this investment at all. Not at all. I invest without thinking about it, and the market does what it does, and the majority of the time I’ll make more money. Some weeks it goes down, and even some years it will go down, but none of that matters. Assuming our economy has many years in it – the investments will ultimately go up. And I won’t think about any of it.

Compare that to the Melbourne property I own with a couple of mates inside of a Self Managed Super Fund. We have to have annual meetings with each other, with the accountant, with the rental manager, with the banks, think about tenants, think about bills, think about vacancy – think about everything! There’s a lot of thinking going on!

If you’ve read any of my previous articles on decision fatigue you’ll know I’m not a big fan of thinking about investing and cash flow. Turns out you get better results when things are set up on automatic.

Which is why I ask – did you miss out?

Raiz shouldn’t be your entire investment strategy – that wouldn’t be prudent. No one should have all their eggs in one basket when it comes to investments. But should it be an additional little regular investment you have on the side which you spend zero head space on?

Yeah.

Use it for Christmas presents every year, use it for an annual getaway, use it for an emergency account (probably the best idea) or use it to simply ‘go hard on the money’ and learn about investing in the simplest way possible. Whichever way you choose to use your Raiz account is up to you – just don’t miss out.

Check out the exclusive Acorns offer for Clayton Daniel’s new book Fund Your Ideal Lifestyle.