A smarter way to start or scale your investing. Tailored portfolios, expert advice at every step. No management fees. No minimums.
Fruitful is a financial wellness membership that provides access to:
1. Unlimited expert advice and support from a dedicated Fruitful Guide, who is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ Professional that helps with all aspects of your finances.
2. A 5.00% APY High Yield Savings Account, 12x the national average
3. Tailored investment portfolios with expert support at every step and no management fees.
The combo of these 3 core benefits (including high yield savings) allows our members to organize and optimize their finances in a way that’s simple, smart, stress-free, and sustainable. Members improve their finances, make real progress toward goals, and eliminate stress. That sounds nice!
Many available investing options can present challenges in a couple ways. You can either:
1) pay someone a lot in asset management fees to “manage” your investments, hopefully in line with your goals and risk tolerance; or,
2) go it on your own with robo advisors, hoping you clicked the right boxes to get the investments that align with your goals and risk tolerance immediately and over time.
Having a personal financial Guide advising on and supporting your decisions, combined with our streamlined process for setting up and scaling your investments means that you get a portfolio designed to meet your goals without confusion or the negative impact caused by management fees.
No, we don’t charge management fees on your investment accounts. Fruitful’s membership cost covers all member benefits. We think the absolute worst place for an investment firm to charge their fees is from your investment account because it can slow down the potential growth of your investments, and also requires that more of your portfolio is kept in cash (to be able to pay the fees) — potentially slowing it down even more. Translation - by removing the management fees the money you set aside for investing can be fully working for you, all the time, and your returns will not be eaten away, allowing them to grow more over time.
Tax-loss harvesting is a strategy that reduces your taxes on investments by selling securities that have decreased in value at the same time that you sell positions that have risen in value, and then immediately buying similar securities to maintain similar investment positions. This effectively keeps the composition of your portfolio the same but can minimize the taxes on realized gains.
Your Fruitful Guide will work with you to recommend the account type and asset allocation that’s right for you based on several factors, including your goals, risk tolerance, and future plans. Our investment approach is data-backed and straightforward. We build low-cost, highly-diversified portfolios primarily using exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and index funds, and may include some mutual funds. Individual stocks and bonds are not included in Fruitful’s investment strategies.
Robo-advisors often make portfolio recommendations without the full context of your larger financial picture and how that changes over time. For instance, if you told a robo-advisor you have $10k to invest in a brokerage and need the money in 15 years, it might recommend an asset allocation that addresses only that information. That may not be helpful and aligned with the other parts of your financial roadmap. Fruitful believes it’s important to take a step back and ask, “Hey, what else is going on? Do you have credit card debt to pay down, are you buying a house soon, how have you been saving for retirement?” Our financial Guides help you navigate decision making at every step by understanding your entire financial world and optimizing your investment approach accordingly.
Our Guides tailor members' investment approaches to their personal goals, lifestyles, timelines, and risk-tolerances. Our portfolios are built from a carefully curated list of low-cost index, mutual, and exchange traded funds to minimize expenses and maximize diversification, providing members with broad exposure to different asset classes including domestic, non-US developed, and emerging stocks as well as corporate, government, and international bonds. Our core aim? Striking the risk-reward balance that's right for each member and their unique financial journey.
Your financial Guide is like your holistic financial wellness guru — they get a picture of your entire financial life, what’s going on now, and what’s coming down the pipeline to determine how to optimally allocate and invest your money to balance the many priorities you may be juggling. Your Guide will help you choose the right approach based on your goals, tolerance for risk, and timeline, among other factors.
Yes, and this is expected and accommodated as your financial goals and priorities shift over time. Your investment strategy is a part of your larger financial strategy that you and your Guide will work on together.
Fruitful supports and manages individual, joint, and trust non-retirement accounts as well as Roth, traditional, rollover, simple, and SEP IRAs. We can also provide strategy, ongoing advice, and support on investments not directly managed by us. Fruitful also offers a high-yield cash account. Learn more here.
An expense ratio is a yearly fee that mutual, index, and exchange-traded funds charge. If a fund has a 1% expense ratio, you're shelling out $1 for every $100 you put in. High fees can eat into your returns big time. Fruitful managed investment portfolios have an average expense ratio of just 0.048%. That’s really low - around 1/10 of the average expense ratio across the fund industry, which was 0.47% in 2022.¹
¹Mutual fund and ETF expense ratio averages sourced from Vanguard. Link here.
Yes! Talk to your Guide about this process and what it means for your current holdings. At Fruitful, our investment approach is built around diversification, so we don’t hold individual stocks or bonds in our Members’ accounts. Not only does this align with our advice, but it helps us keep our costs low and our service seamless. Any positions you transfer in will be sold and reallocated based on the asset allocation you determined with your Guide.
Our portfolios are designed around diversification using exchange-traded funds, index funds, and sometimes mutual funds. If you want to maintain some employer stock, you should keep that outside Fruitful. That said, your Guide may recommend diversifying some of those holdings, and in that case, you can make a transfer of some stock to Fruitful, where it can be sold and allocated based on your personalized portfolio.