When it comes to making the most of your money, you’re well equipped to take control. You have a solid understanding of how interest rates affect investing. You know the top investment options at your disposal, and you’re keenly aware of their advantages and disadvantages. Despite this, though, finding good investment apps for students is really difficult. It doesn’t matter what kind of investor you are or what type of student-investor you are aspiring to be – you need good investment apps working in your favor so that you can confidently invest your money to its highest potential.
What Should College Students Invest In?
When you just start investing with little amounts of money, you should consider investing in lower-risk investments. This will help you get used to the investing process without risking too much of your money if something goes wrong with it.
By this, I don’t mean certificates of deposit or short-term bonds, but rather investments that don’t carry risk tied to a specific company or sector.
Because traditional students begin college as teenagers and can start investing young, they should favor riskier asset types like stocks rather than bonds.
When you are investing at 18, these will have the greatest overall upside potential and take advantage of college students’ greatest asset: youth.
In general, college students should focus on what they are best at learning and enjoy before looking into investing in anything else. For example, the best investments for young adults is an investment in themselves by attending college.
As for how to invest their money in the stock market, they should likely start with investing in index funds. Index funds are investments that mimic the performance of a market index like the S&P 500 or Nasdaq and do not require any active trading on your part.
So, if you’re just beginning to invest, it’s a good place to start.
These low-cost, diversified investment options allow you to buy stocks but don’t require you to do any of the research into what those stocks are.
When selecting an investing platforms for beginners, they should grow with the user and make their money work for them.
For example, if a college student starts with index funds as an investment, when they graduate from college they’ll be able to invest in other more complex or riskier investments like individual companies.
For the more engaged investor, you can identify these individual stock opportunities with the best stock picking services, stock advisor services or through stock investment newsletters.
Likewise, you can conduct your own stock research and analysis with apps and find undervalued stocks before the market has caught on.
At the same time, if you’re not sure what to invest in, index funds are a good place to start. They’re also a good place to invest for your entire life.
They require no active trading and provide diversification for even just $500 or less with very little effort involved from you. They do the heavy lifting for your portfolio automatically.
What are the Best Investment Apps for College Students?
When looking for the best investment apps for beginners, you will want to consider apps that offer a variety of investment options and allow you to track your stocks as you wish, research and read stock news and grow with your needs.
Investing apps for beginners should also be easy-to-use, mobile-friendly and provide useful features such as automatic rebalancing or the ability to set up recurring investments with just one swipe.
The following list represents the best investing apps for college students starting to invest for the first time.
1. Public.com
- Available: Sign up here
- Price: Free trades
Public.com is the social investing app meant to mimic younger generations’ affinity for social media. The app allows you to follow investor influencers and share and like their trades.
Additionally, the app enables users to share real-time investing activity with friends and family via public posts or private messages.
Public.com is a great way for new investors to learn how stocks work by following more experienced traders. Further, you don’t need to commit significant amounts of money to get started through this micro investing app.
The downside of Public is that it lacks some of the advanced features offered by other apps.
Read more in our Public.com investing app review.Public.com | Commission-Free Themed Investing
- Public.com offers zero-commission trading on thousands of stocks and ETFs, available as fractional shares
- Uses a social feed where members can share why they believe in certain companies (or don’t) and can post comments on others’ trades
- Can invest in curated lists of stocks and ETFs for people to aggregate investments by interest area or values
Learn MoreOffer valid for U.S. residents 18+ and subject to account approval. There may be other fees associated with trading. See public.com/disclosures/.
2. Webull
- Available: Sign up here
- Price: Free trades
Webull is a new free stock trading app, offering a better platform of investing tools than Robinhood.https://abd047f5bd3880a87fedf90124d1bd51.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
The Webull investing app offers a variety of investing strategies including “Instant Orders.” This allows Webull users to make trades within seconds.
Further, the app also offers a high-quality trading platform that is easy to use and understand — even for beginners.
Consider signing up with Webull if you’re looking for an investing solution free from fees or overly complicated features.
For opening an account and making an initial deposit, the service also offers free stocks for signing up.Our Self-Directed Investing App PickWebull | No Minimums, Free Trades
- The Webull app offers free equity and option trading, advanced reporting and in-depth analysis.
- LIMITED TIME OFFER: Open an account and receive one free stock worth ($3 – $300) and deposit at least $5 to receive a second free stock ($8 – $2,000 value).
3. Acorns
- Available: Sign up here
- Price: Acorns Lite: $1/mo, Acorns Personal: $3/mo, Acorns Family: $5/mo
Acorns is an investing app for minors and young adults specifically designed for beginners who want to start investing in stocks. While helpful to introduce investing for kids, it also works beyond childhood.
Acorns rounds up your everyday purchases on your debit card to the nearest dollar, invests that money for you and then charges a small fee each month depending on your plan.
Users can invest over time without having to think about it consciously or set aside any capital upfront while still making significant returns on their investments by using what they already spend each day.
The app is completely free if you’re a college student with a school email address (it must end with .edu). Afterward, the service offers different tiers amounting to only $1 – $5 per month, depending on the services purchased.
The company offers a linked banking product that allows users to deposit their paycheck and then invest all or part of that money automatically into the Acorns portfolio, making it a truly hands-off investing solution.
Acorn’s recent partnership with CNBC allows investors access live market coverage during trading hours including breaking news alerts, stock charts and financial literacy resources.
Learn more in our Acorns review.Our Micro-Investing App PickAcorns | Invest, Earn, Grow, Spend, Later
- From acorns, mighty oaks do grow. Grow your oak!
- In under 5 minutes, get investment accounts for you and your family, plus retirement, checking, ways to earn more money, and grow your knowledge.
- Famous for investing spare change automatically through Round-Ups, this all-in-one financial app helps younger generations start investing earlier.
- Just $3 or $5/mo.
- Bonus: Get $5 to start & $75 for taking specific actions in an Acorns Checking account*
Learn More* Must receive 2 or more direct deposits of at least $250/deposit and spend at least $500 from the Checking account within 3 months of first qualifying deposit. $75 bonus will be deposited into your Acorns account within 45 days.
Related: Best Acorns Alternatives: Micro-Investing Apps to Use
oving away from home, making new friends and getting to class on time are some of the big changes college students face after high school. With all that this new group of adults is facing, it’s a wonder that there’s time for anything else, let alone investing.
But surprisingly, college is actually one of the best opportunities to get started in the world of investing. Even those with only a little bit of cash can begin to build a portfolio, and it can actually be an advantage because you’ll be learning how to invest – and dealing with some inevitable losses – without the risk of losing a large sum of money.
College is a great time to start investing
Sure, college can be one of the most difficult times to scrounge up the extra change just to do the things you need to do, let alone the things you want to do. But it doesn’t take much money to get into the investing game. With all the free or low-cost options available today, a modest $20 or $30 can get you in the game. More importantly it gets you thinking about investing.
In fact, the hardest part of starting to invest is beginning to think of yourself as an investor – whether as a real owner of publicly traded companies or even a holder of various cryptocurrencies.
You’ll want to take an owner’s long-term mentality toward your holdings, analyze what’s happening in the market periodically and make moves that look like they have a good chance of paying off, for example. Learning these lessons early – when they’re not costly – is valuable.
While we normally think of investing as reserved for the wealthy, it absolutely doesn’t have to be that way. Students should consider how they can use investing to create and secure their financial future, even before they’re out building their careers.
Here are seven ways for college students to get started in investing, from the super-safe to the bold.
1. Consider starting with a high-yield savings account or CDs
One of the simplest ways to give your savings a boost is to open a high-yield savings account. These accounts pay interest on your deposits at rates far above what is available through traditional savings or checking accounts, while still offering you the ability to make withdrawals at any time.
Savers don’t often think of bank products (such as high-yield savings accounts, or a certificate of deposit, or CD) as investments, but they are. And they’re some of the safest alternatives around. CDs will pay you a fixed rate of interest in exchange for you committing money to the bank for a specified timeframe. These investments can be a good place to park money that you don’t need until a specific time in the future.
For example, if you have money for next year’s tuition, you probably want that in a super-safe account that won’t fluctuate with the stock market. A CD fits the bill for exactly this kind of requirement.
2. Turn to a free or low-cost broker
If you want to jump into investing, it couldn’t be much cheaper to get going. There are many impressive low-cost online brokers – such as Fidelity Investments and Charles Schwab – who offer free stock and ETF trades while also providing great research and educational tools to get you started on your way. Both Fidelity and Schwab, for example, scored top marks in these areas and are noted for their overall client service and investor-friendliness.
But if you want to go all free – great for college students looking to cut costs – then you can turn to Robinhood. Robinhood’s main selling point is that it’s free to trade on the platform, including options and crypto. Robinhood Gold also provides Morningstar research for a relatively cheap $5 per month. With a slick trade-anywhere mobile app, Robinhood makes an excellent choice for those looking to cut costs to the minimum.
Webull is another option for the particularly cost-conscious investor. Webull, like Robinhood, also features commission-free trading but has more customer support options and offers retirement accounts that Robinhood doesn’t.
3. Invest a little each month
If you go with a commission-free broker, you’re going to be able to invest modest amounts each month and not have your capital eaten up by fees. So more money actually goes into your stocks or funds. You can put away even just $20 or $30 a month, and start to see the money in action in the stock market. A number of brokers now also offer investors the ability to buy fractions of a share too.
It’s important to get started regardless of what the economy is doing. Even with a modest amount invested, you’ll likely be more motivated to follow the market. And importantly, you can begin thinking of yourself as an investor. Having money invested also encourages you to conduct research and analyze your holdings. So beginning with even just a little can be really beneficial.
4. Buy an S&P 500 index fund
One of the easiest ways for an investor to get started is to buy an index fund, and many of the most popular index funds are based on the Standard & Poor’s 500 index of large American companies. An index fund holds shares of all the stocks in the index, hundreds in the case of the S&P 500. By holding so many stocks across a wide variety of industries, the fund is highly diversified and typically offers less-volatile returns than owning individual stocks.
Another advantage of an index fund is that you don’t have to know a lot to get started. Buying an S&P 500 index fund is like buying the market, and you’ll get the market return. It’s a great way to learn how investing works, and it’s the strategy recommended for most investors by legendary investor and billionaire Warren Buffett.
5. Sign up for a robo-advisor
If you’re not ready to pick individual stocks or even an index fund, then you can opt for a robo-advisor. A robo-advisor automatically creates a portfolio for you, buying a selection of funds based on your time horizon and how aggressive you want to be with your investments. Beginning investors can get started with very little money – even $20 can get you going – and you can add money incrementally without any additional transaction costs.
For their services, robo-advisors usually charge a percentage of your assets, often 0.25 percent annually, though some waive the fee for small accounts. Wealthfront and Betterment are two of the larger robo-advisors that hit this price point.
Typically you won’t pay any additional fees to the advisor, though any funds that you own usually have fees based on how much you own. You’ll often get other benefits from the advisor, too, including attractive interest rates on cash accounts and you typically won’t have to lock your money in.
Conclusions
Ok, so I wanna share with you all the best investment apps for students. Now that sounds very random, but I think it’s important! You see, us students are always looking for ways to make passive income right? I don’t know about you guys but investing would be one of my favorite ways to do this. I created a list of some of the best investment apps for students. Some are free to use and others are paid ones. So regardless if you want to make money or not, I suggest at least trying some of these apps out.