Choice: Bitcoin in your IRA

I liked the app for a while. Honestly, I only put a little in to an ira to hold some crypto and play blinko. And I suppose all good things must come to the end… When they updated their fees a couple months ago I was surprised to see a minimum fee of $20 to hold crypto if you were not above a certain threshold. I was not, and likely I was the type of user they were looking to weed out (congrats, it worked). Nonetheless it said there were 0 fees to have an account and 0 fees to hold publicly traded stocks. So I thought I would just change and hold stocks, and avoid the crypto holding fee. Then I saw the fee hit. When I reached out to the support team, they said that there is also a $20 a month fee to have the account open (even thought it still says there is a $0 account fee). So after some back and forth they thanked me for pointing out the inconsistency and they updated their fee page (after billing me) to show the hidden $20 monthly fee. Glad to be of service! Was I given any refund, or royalties for pointing out this great miss? No, obviously not. However, it was at that point that I did not trust them to be honest, nor trust them to hold my crypto, non-qualified or not! So I gave in and left, because I have a family and better things to do than chase down a lame $20 fee… But I did learn to “hold” my crypto with someone else. These guys are either dishonest or they have no clue what they are doing and they are making it up as they go.

I was very excited to see Choice by Kingdom Trust’s offering for a retirement account that accepts crypto. Their fees are very reasonable and they had pretty solid reviews from customers. Transferring my Roth IRA was very easy. They were on top of the transfer process and sent me emails at various points to make sure that things were on the right track. My biggest complaint of Choice is that i feel like their user interface is in need of massive work. Both the desktop and mobile app need a decent amount of work. Choice’s customer (i would assume) are made up of people who want to take control of their retirement account. But their user interface is severely lacking. Purchases dont show up in the account immediately, the account’s performance is not reflected in real time and you have to switch between the web app and mobile app to get all the information you need. There are several other issues i have and they mostly have to deal with basic things that typical brokers like E*Trade or Coinbase have offered for a long time. Having said all that, the customer service has been pretty good. I have had most of my concerns answered by Autumn. She has been helpful. However, the company needs some help in the technology department to make it a legitimate threat to the traditional brokers.

Overall love the app and the fact that I can manage my IRAs from here instead of the desktop version. One thing I find lacking is that buy/sell orders via mobile are only executed as limit orders. This can be challenging when trying to fill an order, so it would be great if we had the option to buy/sell assets at market value instead of being converted to a limit order behind the scenes. I tested this with about $50 with a couple digital assets and both buy orders ended up being canceled after they expired. While it’s awesome to see things in real time now via the app, I’ll continue to use the website specifically to execute trades until market orders are available via the app. One other improvement/request I’d like to make is a consolidated view of all transactions, similar to what the desktop site shows. On the mobile app, you can currently only see transactions for one asset by selecting that asset.