Wealthify Review
Our verdict: Wealthify offers a simple to use investment platform with a good range of features for the novice UK investor. Experienced investors may find it better to look elsewhere.
Wealthify Review
Table of contents
What is Wealthify?
Based in Cardiff, Wealthify is a relatively new robo-advisor that lets you invest as little as £1. To keep a user’s investment management costs to a minimum, they focus on investing in ETFs similar to other robo-advisers (such as Nutmeg, Wealthsimple and Moneyfarm).
Aviva recently bought a majority stake, so it has a big household name as a shareholder which is always a good sign of stability for the business as a whole.
Wealthify has a range of investment options you can choose from such as:
- Investment ISA – You can choose between a Cash ISA, Investment ISA, Innovative Finance ISA, or a Lifetime ISA and can invest or save up to £20,000 tax-efficiently each year.
- General Investment – This will be the best option if you have already exhausted your ISA quota.
- Junior ISA – If you want to invest enough for your child’s future, the Junior ISA is an excellent choice. It can be an effective option to save up to £4,368 tax-free for the future of your child.
- Personal Pension – This, obviously, is a plan for your long term goals. You can either supplement your regular pension or transfer your existing funds for a better yield.
How does Wealthify work?
Very little input is needed from you to start to have Wealthify manage your portfolio.
When you first enter the platform, you’ll answer a few questions about your investment style and goals, and a primary portfolio balance will be recommended. You can switch portfolios at any time, but you cannot modify the portfolio composition or buy individual shares.
When investing solo – it can be hard to keep your portfolio aligned to your goals – over time investing in a range of things at once may cause your portfolio balance to drift from your target allocations. That’s not the case when you use a roboadviser like Wealthify as you will always stay on track with automatic portfolio rebalancing within the app; whenever your investments fall out of line, your portfolio is rebalanced automatically by Wealthify, so you never need to worry about it.
There are five different investment portfolios spread around the world and amongst different sorts of investments – you don’t pick your own funds and shares.
Wealthify’s Performance 2023
All of the figures below are Wealthify’s simulated 2020 performance figures. They are “simulated” because they’re based on the performance of a model that mirrors the decisions Wealthify made for customers’ plans. All simulated figures assume that the account size is over £500 and that a fee of 0.60% has been taken as well as fund costs.
If you want to see the performance for other years, you can see these on Wealthify’s website.
Remember that past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results.
Wealthify ethical plan performance
Plan – based on risk appetite | 2020 simulated performance |
---|---|
Cautious | 4.14% |
Tentative | 6.45% |
Confident | 9.04% |
Ambitious | 11.56% |
Adventurous | 13.43% |
Wealthify original plan performance
Plan – based on risk appetite | 2019 simulated performance |
---|---|
Cautious | 2.70% |
Tentative | 3.88% |
Confident | 4.87% |
Ambitious | 5.12% |
Adventurous | 5.06% |
Fees – How much does Wealthify cost?
Wealthify has tried to make their fee structure nice and simple by splitting them into two costs; the Wealthify fee and the average investment fund cost:
The Wealthify Fee
This is Wealthify’s cut and is fairly competitive when compare it to other roboadvisors. They charge a straight 0.60% fee that doesn’t change whether you’re investing £1 or £10,000.
Average Investment Costs
This is the fund fees – the cost of investing in a certain fund – that Wealthify has no real control over although they do mention on their website that they specifically look for funds with good value here.
How does Wealthify compare to others?
In terms of performance; most of the roboadvisors within our test set perform similarly. When we compare Wealthify’s fees to Moneyfarm or Wealthsimple, for example, you’ll find that once you’ve hit the £10,000 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.
Our verdict
Is Wealthify worth looking at? Yes, we think so especially for beginners.
Wealthify is perfect for those that are new to investing or those people who would rather avoid the hassle of picking specific shares and funds, so long as they could manage the risk. The app lets you get started with any amount of money and the recent addition of regular direct debits makes it even easier for novices to begin to build great investing habits.
For comparison, we’d also recommend checking out Moneyfarm, Wealthsimple and Nutmeg as solid Wealthify alternatives.
More experienced investors may find it too limiting, especially in terms of the lack of controls. If you’re comfortable with getting your hands dirty; we would recommend checking out Interactive Investors or Hargreaves Lansdown as alternatives.