Ellevest: Investing for women

I reallyyyyy wanted to like this app. I downloaded and entered a lot of my personal and contact information because I wanted to see how the app works and how it makes investments with my money. However as part of the onboarding process it asks you to link your bank account info before you can proceed into the app. I’m always very hesitant when it comes to providing that kind of information before I know what I’m getting myself into. So obviously I abandoned the process but now I keep getting spam emails from them that are impossible to unsubscribe from. I’ve tried logging in on the app and on the web browser to edit my email notification settings or just delete my account however it will not let you continue past the onboarding process without providing your bank info !!!!! This is incredibly irritating and an extremely shady UX practice!!! I’ve read in other reviews that once you link your bank info they make it impossible to unsubscribe or get in touch with them and they’ll just keep taking your money. They need to fix these issues before I consider downloading this app again.

I love Ellevest and everything it stands for, and as a woman in my late-twenties who had yet to build a dedicated investment account outside of my 401K, I was really excited to branch into investing with Ellevest! The articles and courses for learning are great. I think Ellevest still has a lot of improvements they can make on sharing data, insights and learnings for your accounts. Finding the accounts that my money is invested in and learning more about them isn’t super user-friendly or intuitive and honestly doesn’t make much sense. It would be great if there were articles or an easy way to learn more about what they’ve invested my money in and why. There’s a chart that shows my overall projections based on what I invest each month, but I’d also love to see a chart with my overall account holdings over time and see how it’s risen and grown. I feel like their education offerings are very generic and would appreciate if they could build those features out to be more specific or at least link to education articles that could teach me more when I’m in my account looking at my portfolio. Overall, I really believe in this company and am glad to be supporting it, but I don’t feel like I’m learning as much as I could and don’t have as much visibility and education on my portfolio as I’d like. Hoping that’s in their improvement plans in the coming year!

Everyone should invest here—for bettering themselves and the world I LOVE Ellevest. I subscribed to their free newsletter for months before I gave them the dime. The articles are thoughtful about the roles of women+, bipoc, and lgbt people in the economy, with plenty of citations to reliable sources! I continue to be shocked when Ellevest is the only place I see statistics about how hard women are being hit in the recession. (The emails also have excellent memes.) Once I was sold I opened a Build Wealth account, and started putting in $50/month. (There is no minimum balance!!) I chose Social Impact investing because I want my dollars to make a difference. I love how they have little symbols in the app to indicate which specific funds in my portfolio are sustainability focused, woman-led, or oriented towards community development. After seeing the success with my first account, I opened a retirement account with their Core Impact portfolio (I wanted the increased stability for my retirement). Their company is super straightforward. I never thought I would be investing this much at age 24, but I trust them. In regular emails, Ellevest also discusses critical issues including their own successes and shortcomings regarding feminism, anti-racism, anti-ableism, and as an lgbtq ally. They cover the BLM movement, and focus on relevant articles during the celebratory months for every marginalized group. (Disability month is closest to my heart.) I can never imagine myself investing anywhere else.