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U6Gf8WQP | 10 years ago

> Wealthfront is indeed a ripoff for the well-informed.

Do you feel that this is universally true or situation-dependent? I consider myself reasonably informed and Wealthfront appears to be a strong, if not the strongest, option for my financial situation (young, most of my net worth is in a taxable account, direct indexing, regular expected capital gains to pair with tax losses).

discuss

order

maaku|10 years ago

First of all, you are probably not taking full advantage of tax-efficient accounts. Are you contributing your maximums, including back door strategies?

Second, you can do substantially better than Wealthfront with even an extremely lazy portfolio. Heck, put all of your funds into a Vanguard target-date fund (the laziest of the laziest) and you will do better than Wealthfront, with only 15 min of effort per year to rebalance.

The kind of tax loss harvesting Wealthfront does is usually a pseudo-benefit. You're usually in a better position just holding until you need distributions for retirement. On paper it sometimes works out, but only when you make assumptions that generally involve timing the market to harvest without loss while avoiding wash sale rules.

That said, if you can't be trusted or can't trust yourself to buy a simple lazy portfolio and hold for decades, then by all means pay the 0.25% annual fee to have someone else take the management keys away from you. As one of my coworkers said, Wealthfront is lazy advice -- telling someone to use Wealthfront is easy to do and usually gets that person into a better position than they otherwise would be, and requires minimal effort from me in advising them. But it is not the optimal solution out there and anyone can easily do better if they are willing to learn and capable of exerting self control.

sopooneo|10 years ago

Just for my understanding, if all your investments are in a "Vanguard target-date fund" then why would you have to spend any time per year rebalancing? Isn't that what the target date funds do for you?