Wealthify Review

Their products include:

• General Investment Account
• Stocks and Shares ISA
• Junior Stocks and Shares ISA
• Pension
• Ethical Investments across all products

Wealthify work in a similar way to most other robo-advisors whereby they offer you a pre-made portfolio based on your attitude to risk.

All customers are required to complete a suitability questionnaire before determining their risk style and there are 5 options for the portfolios; Cautious, Tentative, Confident, Ambitious and Adventurous.

Your investment will be spread across the following products and the percentages changed depending on how adventurous your risk level is:

• Cash
• Shares
• Government Bonds
• Property
• Corporate Bonds

Research services & tools

As Wealthify is a Robo-advisor service, it’s all done for you, meaning you can’t control investments beyond choosing your risk level as Wealthify choose where to allocate your money. Because of this, there is a lack of research tools available that you would normally see with other self-directed services.

Nevertheless, they still have a pretty good ‘blog’ section on their website which can keep you up to date with all the latest news and trends from Brexit to the Coronavirus having an effect on world markets.

Wealthify actually has one of the better blogs that I have come across. It’s updated a couple of times a week and you can filter the posts by category so you can learn all about investing if you’re a newbie or filter articles about investments for children all within a couple of clicks.

They also have a hearty FAQ section which is super easy to navigate thanks to the categories on the left-hand side of the page.

They try to be as transparent as possible with their customers and on their website you can find a slider in their fees section that helps to estimate the exact pound amount you’ll be paying each month.

The Wealthify fee

This is basically Wealthify’s platform fee and is pretty competitive when I looked at it compared to other Robo-advisor services. They charge a straight 0.60% fee that doesn’t change whether you’re investing £1,000 or £100,000.

Like with all Robo-advisors, the rate is much higher than what you’d get if you were building yourself a bespoke portfolio with traditional big-name platforms like AJ Bell, Charles Stanley Direct, or Cavendish Online but is in-keeping with rates for a done for you portfolio…well to an extent.

Their fee represents good value for money for those with smaller sized investments of say, less than £10,000, but quickly becomes more expensive than their competitors when you have a portfolio size of over £50,000.

When I compare Wealthify’s fees to Moneyfarm, for example, you’ll find that once you’ve hit the 10k mark you should really be starting to shop around, even if you are sticking with a Robo-advisor service as there are much more competitive fees out there.

Average investment costs

This is basically the fund fees, however, Wealthify has no control over this amount. They do state on their website that they try to select funds with an average fee of around 0.16% for regular funds and 0.7% for ethical funds. This fee includes any fund charges as well as market spread.

Then you pick your investment style (there are 5 levels of risk to choose from) and the handy calculator on the right will give you a rough estimate of how much you could have in your account in 10 years’ time. Next, you select whether you want to go down the regular route or ethical route in terms of funds.

You’re then given a quick summary of some key information about the types of investments that are going to be in the funds you’re investing in as well as the geographic location and the names of the funds themselves so you can go out and do some further research if you prefer.

You are then taken to a suitability questionnaire to ensure that you know what you’re doing and understand that your capital can be at risk. This is due to Wealthify being regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and is designed to protect investors such as you from taking risks you’re unaware of.

Wealthify only allows you to attempt these questions twice and if they deem you unsuitable, you won’t be able to open an account. The questionnaire itself is fairly simple as it asks how you personally feel about risks towards losses, job security and other factors and will take you no more than a couple of minutes to fill out.

You’ll then be asked about your salary before tax annually as well as your monthly take-home amount, monthly living expenses and total debt before assessing whether or not the product you’ve selected is appropriate for you.

Transferring your investments to Wealthify

Transferring your investments is really easy and is free of charge. When you’re initially signing up you can actually select whether or not you’ll be transferring in from another provider. If you decide to transfer in at a later date, you just need to fill out this form to get the ball rolling.

They didn’t actually have information on the website about how long transfers in can take so I reached out to support for clarification on this one and they stated that Cash ISAs take around 15 working days to complete, with Stocks and Shares ISAs taking much longer; around 30 working days to complete. The latter, being 6-weeks in real-time is pretty slow compared with other providers who can usually have you transferred in within the month.

The great news is that transfers-in don’t count towards your annual tax-free allowance, however, if you’re transferring from a cash ISA, Wealthify doesn’t offer a cash ISA product and you would be investing in a more risky Stocks and Shares ISA. You’ll also have limited control over where your money is being invested.

I really like that you can open an account with as little as £1 or a regular monthly contribution of just £10 as some other Robo-investing services require much higher deposits like Nutmeg and Moneyfarm who require £500 and £1,500 respectively.

Their ISA is not flexible, which isn’t exactly a deal-breaker, but with many competitors offering it, it is a nice backup to have should you want to access funds in an emergency and replenish them within the same tax year.

Wealthify was founded in 2016, but generally speaking, their performance has been pretty good across all of their funds; however, on more cautious funds, other Robo-advisor investment services did make their clients slightly more over the last few years. The 2018 year was a pretty poor year for everyone, but Wealthify customers who were in the most cautious fund only made a slight loss of 1.53% with the adventurous losses being at 7.21%. Compare this to the losses of Nutmeg’s riskiest portfolio and you’d have been better off with Wealthify.

Wealthify did also manage to make back the 2018 losses with a great year in 2019 where they performed slightly better than Nutmeg in their Tentative and Confident funds and even showed a solid advantage on Wealthsimple in their Tentative fund.

It’s always great to see investment services providers open up their products to a wider market which is why I’m happy that Wealthify offers Junior ISA accounts too to encourage saving for the little ones. Because Wealthify has a great user-friendly app too, you can sit down with the kids, monitor the investments and teach them about what’s happening to their money in an easy-to-digest format. Wealthify gives you the opportunity to invest the full allowance for a Junior ISA per tax year (£9,000).

Wealthify have recently added the functionality for friends and family to contribute towards a Junior ISA upon invitation by the parents. This may be one of the contributing factors that has earned Wealthify the award of Best Junior ISA at the Personal Finance Awards 2019/20

Wealthify will then present you with an estimated value for your pension when you come to retirement age.

Wealthify provide you with all the details of how your pension will be invested including assets types, regions and funds. Once you are happy with your investments and have opened an account, you will pay a flat fee of 0.60% on top of fund fees of approximately 0.22%. This makes your total fees approximately 0.82, which is higher than some other providers with Moneyfarm costing between 0.35% – 0.75% and AJ Bell costing up to 0.25%.

Wealthify customer service

Wealthify have one of the better customer service teams we’ve come across, especially when it comes to response times. I love their live chat function for quick-fire questions and think that it’s something that all investment service providers should offer.

The team are available from Monday to Friday, 8 am-6:30 pm and Saturdays 9 am-12:30 pm. From our experience with them, they were very knowledgeable about their platform and you can also give them a call or send a secure message if live chat isn’t really your thing.

Their FAQ section covers most questions that you can think of and it’s very easy to navigate. They also provide a search option if you specifically know what you’re looking for.