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Acorns Review: Should You Switch to ESG Sustainable Portfolios?

Acorns is a personal finance app that lets you round up and invest your spare change. In 2021, they launched Sustainable Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) portfolios. We think it’s a solid and inexpensive option, especially for beginners.

SustainFi   Updated April 11th, 2022

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Summary

SustainFi Rating:	4.4 / 5
Account minimum	$5
Management fee	$3 or $5/month
Sustainable options	Yes
Investment expense ratio (80% stock portfolio)	• Core Portfolio: 0.05% • ESG Portfolio: 0.16%
Accounts supported	• Individual and joint taxable investment accounts • Traditional, Roth, and SEP IRAs • Custodial investment accounts • 401k rollovers
Human advisors	No
Tax-loss harvesting	No
Automatic rebalancing	Yes
Features	Save your change, bank accounts, earn money with Acorns partners
Best for	Best for beginners, investors struggling to save

What is Acorns?

Acorns is a personal finance app that lets you invest spare change from everyday purchases in diversified portfolios made up of exchange-traded funds (ETFs). The app was launched in 2014 to make investing seamless for everybody and has since expanded to retirement and checking accounts.

In 2021, Acorns grew to over 9.5 million sign-ups and nearly $5 billion in assets under management.

Signing up

Starting to invest with Acorns is easy, but note that you must be a U.S. resident over 18 years of age.

• Go to acorns.com and pick your membership plan (Personal or Family)
• Link your bank account
• Input your personal information and answer a few questions about your investment goals and timeline
• Based on your answers, Acorns will determine your risk tolerance and suggest a diversified portfolio made up of ETFs. (ETFs are diversified holdings of stocks and bonds. They frequently replicate an index such as the S&P 500)
• To round up your change, you need to link your credit and debit cards. Acorns will automatically round up your purchases to the next dollar and invest the change once it adds up to $5
• In addition to investing the round-ups, you can also add money to your account manually or set up recurring investments
• You can switch to the ESG Portfolio from the default, Core Portfolio

Acorns Membership Plans

Acorns offers two membership plans that cost $3 or $5 a month. As of September 2021, Acorns Lite ($1/month) is no longer offered.

• Acorns Personal ($3/month) includes personal investment, retirement, and checking accounts plus a metal debit card
• Acorns Family ($5/month) includes all the Personal features plus Acorns Early, which offers investment accounts for kids. You can learn more about Acorns Early here

The fees are very competitive for higher account balances. However, $3-$5/month may be expensive if you have very little invested. Robo-advisors like Betterment charge 0.25% of assets for managing your investments.

If you only have $1,000 in your account and sign up for Acorns Family ($60/year), you are paying 6% annually. However, if you invest $20,000, you are paying 0.20%, which is cheaper than any other robo-advisor.

Account types

Acorns supports several account types, including:

• Acorns Invest: Taxable personal investment accounts. Your change gets invested in ETFs selected by Acorns based on your investor profile
• Acorns Later: Retirement accounts for traditional, SEP, and Roth IRAs
• Banking. Checking accounts that come with a Visa debit card. The card offers free access to over 55,000 in-network ATMs. Your account is FDIC-insured for up to $250,000
• Acorns Early. Custodial accounts – these are accounts for adults who want to start investing for their children

Acorns Earn

Acorns partners with over 350 brands like Apple, Blue Apron, Chewy, Expedia, Nike, and many others. If you check out using the Acorns portal or their Chrome extension, you get bonus investments in your Acorns account. The portal is similar to a credit cards rewards portal. The bonus investments typically take between 90 and 120 days to show up in your account.

These are some of the brand partners:

Human advisors

Acorns doesn’t offer human advisor access, though it does provide educational resources. If you are looking for human advisors, you can get advisor access from Personal Capital.

Automatic rebalancing and dividend reinvestment

Acorns offers automatic portfolio rebalancing and dividend reinvestment. 

Rebalancing means that the robo-advisors will buy or sell investments to get to your optimal asset allocation, like 80% stocks and 20% bonds. Sometimes when one asset class, like stocks, does much better than another one, like bonds, your portfolio may “drift” and become riskier (or less risky) than it should be. Rebalancing solves that.

Recurring investments and roundups

Acorns also lets you set up recurring investments starting with $5 per day, week, or month. 

Besides, Acorns lets you save more through automatic round-ups. When you buy something with your Acorns debit card or another linked card, Acorns rounds up your transaction to the nearest dollar and invests the change into your Invest account portfolio. According to Acorns, the average user invests over $30 a month through round-ups.

Sustainable ESG investing with Acorns

Acorns now offers environmental, social, and governance (ESG) Portfolios that invest in sustainable funds. They are offered in partnership with iShares, the largest provider of low-cost, sustainable ETFs. These portfolios are designed to perform in line with conventional, Core Portfolios.

🔔 Want to learn more about ESG investing? Check out this ESG investing guide.

Acorns offers five portfolio options, depending how much risk you choose to take when you answer the investor questionnaire. However, the Conservative allocation is not available for ESG (Sustainable) Portfolios. The five allocations are:

• Conservative (100% bonds, not available for Sustainable Portfolios)
• Moderately Conservative (40% stocks, 60% bonds)
• Moderate (60% stocks, 40% bonds)
• Moderately Aggressive (80% stocks, 20% bonds)
• Aggressive (100% stocks)

Broadly speaking, the more aggressive the allocation, the more risk you take (in return for higher expected return), and the more you invest in stocks vs. bonds.

Acorns ESG Portfolios invest in the following ETFs (which are subject to change):

• Large-cap U.S. stocks: ESGU, SUSA
• Small-cap U.S. stocks: ESML
• International, developed markets stocks: ESGD
• Emerging markets stocks: ESGE
• Short-term corporate bonds: SUSB
• Long-term corporate bonds: SUSC
• Short-term Treasury bonds: SHY (not ESG)
• Long-term Treasury bonds: GOVT (not ESG)
• Long-term Treasury bonds: MBB (not ESG)
• U.S. aggregate bonds: EAGG

Not every portfolio includes every single fund, and some of the funds are not sustainable. This is common for ESG portfolios because there aren’t enough large ESG funds to invest in.

Here are the funds for the Moderately Aggressive Sustainable Portfolio option:

Data as of 6/30/2021

And this is what the dashboard looks like:

The dashboard also provides detail on each fund in the portfolio, including key holdings.

The funds in the ESG portfolio cost between 0.05% and 0.25%. The blended cost of the Moderately Aggressive Portfolio is 0.16%, in line with most other robo-advisors that offer sustainable options.

87% of the Moderately Aggressive Portfolio is invested in various ESG funds, and only a few non-ESG bond funds are included. We think this is a good outcome.

We note that the Sustainable Portfolio is not fossil-fuel-free, so you will still have some oil and gas stock exposure. However, it does own fewer fossil fuel stocks than the conventional option.

Acorns Core and ESG (Sustainable) Portfolios compared

We’ve compared the Moderately Aggressive versions of Core and ESG Portfolios.

Data as of 6/30/2021 for the Moderately Aggressive option

Sustainable Portfolios have higher ESG ratings from MSCI and Sustainalytics and invest less in energy (which includes fossil fuels).

However, the Sustainable Portfolio costs slightly more: 0.16% vs. 0.05% for the Core version. In practice, it means $16/year vs. $5/year if you invest $10,000.

The Moderately Aggressive Sustainable Portfolio also includes more funds (ten vs. six) than the Core Portfolio. Instead of just one fund for international stocks, the Sustainable Portfolio had separate funds for developed and emerging markets stocks. They also added a mortgage-backed bond fund and two extra bond funds. We are not sure that four more funds are necessary, but that shouldn’t make a major difference.

How to switch to Acorns ESG Portfolios

If you already have an Acorns account, you can easily switch by logging into your account, selecting the account you’d like to update (“Invest,” “Early,” and/or “Later”), tapping “Portfolio,” and changing the “Theme” to Acorns ESG Portfolios.

Tax considerations when switching to ESG Portfolios

You should know that if you change from a Core to an ESG Portfolio, Acorns will sell all your ETFs and buy new ones. This may have tax implications. If you have a material amount invested, you may want to consult a tax professional. (Acorns does not provide tax advice.)

🔔 Want to compare more options? Check out this list of the top 10 investing apps.

Compare:

• Acorns vs. Stash
• Acorns vs. M1 Finance
• Acorns vs. Robinhood
• Acorns vs. Betterment
• Acorns vs. Wealthfront

NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE. The content is for informational purposes only; you should not construe any such information as investment advice.