Two years ago I stumbled on startup called Wealthfront that automatically invests money for users and seemed to have the lowest fees. It was actually a web development blog post I stumbled on, “Reactive Charts with D3 and Reactive.js” (entry is kind of broken now), but it prompted me to look into the company nonetheless.

After mulling it over since then (life has been pretty crazy lately, so it’s not just that I’m lazy.), I finally decided to start saving some money for retirement at the beginning of this year. If you need some inspiration like I did, check out the “Save A Million Calculator“.

Wealthfront has a little quiz you take to determine your risk level. Being the reckless and impulsive investor I am (jk!), I answered in such a way I ended up with a 10, which is apparently the highest risk profile. So perhaps if you invest at Wealthfront, your mix of funds will look different than mine.

It has been seven weeks now since the bulk of my small investment was in the account, and so far it has earned a 4.1 percent return!

MATH: ( 1 + 0.041 ) ^ ( 52 / 7 ) - 1 = 34.78%

If my math is correct, that is roughly 35 percent annually, but I suspect it will end up more like 10… otherwise it’d be amazing.

If you’re interested in trying them out, I’d appreciate if you use my referral link: http://wlth.fr/1vfqSIm.

As the e-mail invite would have said:

Wealthfront manages your first $10,000 for free, but if you accept my invitation, we’ll both get an additional $5,000 managed for free!

Woo!

Update: I’m now also testing out Betterment, so if you want to sign up there, you can also use my referral link. :-)