hey totally agree with you there. i was using betterment and wealthfront but really all they are doing is charging you an additional fee to buy vanguard funds on your behalf. i also feel like they go too high on international stuff so after seeing the market skyrocket and my gains not really match that i pulled all my money out of wealthfront and betterment and moved over to vanguard.
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Yep, if/once you meet the minimum requirements to purchase the Vanguard funds, it's a good idea to move over. I like Betterment (though not so much their fees that they seem to raise every year now! ugh) for their simple UI and the ability to invest as little as $10 at a time. It is a good way for a new investor to get started with very little money (they let you buy partial ETF shares which is not possible directly from Vanguard) and yet be well diversified. IIRC Wise Banyan is a competitor and they have 0 fees until you deposit over $10,000 as a hook to get people to sign up with them, and they can be a good way to get started as well that's even cheaper than Betterment (you still pay the fund ERs, just not a management fee to Wise Banyan). Once you have $9,000 for mutual funds (or less if you do ETFs or for mututal funds just do target date retirement fund or just start with one fund like total stock and save up for the miniums to puchase total bond and international), you can go to Vanguard and buy into a 3 fund portfolio, and after that the minimum investment can be as little as $1.
I know not everyone is a fan of mutual fund and I know not everyone has the money to buy in initially but you can tricle money in daily or weekly to vanguard mutual funds. At first I was goign to do admiral shares or a couple funds but instead went with the aggressive life strategy fund as opposed to the target date funds as I dont want to get less aggressive over time