Sofi Money and Invest – Banking and Investing for FREE!
Table of Contents
What is Sofi?
Sofi is an online bank that is very oriented towards the social and financial well-being of its customers. They started off as a lending institution that was mainly focused on student loans to help students getting the best rates they could if they were going to get loans for their higher education.
They have since branched out to offer just about all services a financial institution could offer. They offer checking, savings, investment, crypto, student loans, home loans, personal loans, auto loans, small business financing, and several different types of insurance.
They also offer a host of other benefits like educational resources, loan calculators, career coaching, financial and estate planning, and as well as neat events that are entirely free experiences for Sofi’s members.
What is Sofi Money?
Sofi Money offers checking accounts with the most benefits compared to any other banking institution that I’ve ever seen. For one thing, their checking account called Sofi Money has none of the usual fees that you would usually be charged with a lot of other banks, particularly those with physical branches. They also offer 0.25% interest rates, which are 6 times higher than the national average right now.
The fees you don’t get charged include:
- No account opening, monthly, or minimum fees. That way you don’t need to keep such a close eye on how much money is in your account before banks start charging you fees for not having money in the first place.
- No ATM fees. If you were a member prior to 06/09/2020 you were grandfathered into their program where they reimburse ATM fees worldwide, but if you joined after that it’s not worldwide. but it still covers over 55,000 Allpoint ATMs. Luckily, they also offers a feature called ATM Finder in the “More” section in the Sofi Money part of their app to help you find any nearby free ATMs. You can also find their locations online at https://www.allpointnetwork.com/locator.aspx.
- Free direct deposit
- Free overdraft coverage up to $50 once you’ve set up direct deposits with them
- Free checkbooks that you can order at the push of a button on their app
- They have cash back offers if you use their debit card at one of the stores/restaurants available in the “Offers” section
- Free bill payments
- Free mobile check deposit
- Free debit card replacement
- A free peer-to-peer money sending system that you can use with just someone’s email or phone number and transfers funds instantly if they also have a Sofi Money account
Sofi Money also currently also offers a few other nice perks when you join up with them. They are currently offering $100 dollars when you open a new account with them and set up a direct deposit in that account. Similar to the famous Chime banking app, they also allow you to get paid two days early.
What are Sofi Vaults?
Sofi also offers their own version of savings accounts which they call vaults. You can set up these vaults in the Sofi Money section online or on their app. It’s entirely free to open up to 20 vaults at a time. The vaults are typically labeled so that you can organize your savings towards specific goals, like a house, a car, a wedding, or anything else you can think of. Sofi Vaults also offer a few nice features like Autosave and Roundups.
Autosave and Roundups
With Autosave you can set up a specific amount of money from your checking account to be deposited into one of your vaults regularly. With Roundups, you set up your vault to transfer the spare change from purchases using your debit card up to the nearest dollar to be taken from your checking account to be deposited in one of your vaults. Unfortunately, Roundups can only be used on one vault at a time. The best part of the Sofi Vaults is their significant integration with your checking accounts so that you can send money back and forth between them instantly.
Here’s a referral link to get you started with a $50 dollar bonus when opening a Sofi Money account. https://www.sofi.com/invite/money?gcp=cf0bbd0a-0eb9-4780-9542-ae917232b1cf.
What is Sofi Invest?
They also offer its own investment accounts with a wide range of features and allows you to trade for no fees whatsoever. There are a few different types of accounts they offer that include and taxable account where you can choose to invest your way or choose a portfolio that Sofi themselves manage, you can open up an IRA account with the options of traditional, Roth, or SEP from the types you can open, and they even offer investment accounts where you can trade in up to 20 different types of cryptocurrencies.
Investment Options
Sofi offers all the different stock and ETFs that are regularly available on the stock market. They also happen to have several ETFs of their own making. The Sofi Select ETF, which is a much cheaper version of the regular S&P 500 ETFs that follow that index since it’s considerably newer. They also have new ETFs that they created to pay out weekly dividends which is the most frequently paying dividend I’ve ever heard of. That said I really can’t recommend investing in these weekly paying ones since the fees are much higher than the dividends and growth so far.
Sofi also offers the opportunity to invest in many cryptocurrencies which are: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum Classic, Stellar Lumens, Tezos, Chainlink, Cardano, Maker, Basic Attention Token, Uniswap, Filecoin, Aave, Cosmos, The Graph, Algorand, Compound, yearn. finance, and Synthetix. They offer all these different accounts that allow you to do trades with market orders or limit orders.
Stock bits
Similar to many other investment brokerages Sofi Invest offers fractional shares with many popular stocks and ETFs, like Nike or Visa, and even some not-so-well-known stocks like Verso or Peabody Energy, all for as low as $5.
Social Community
Sofi Invest also offers a social platform where people can talk and post about the stock market, cryptocurrencies, and whatever they’ve been trading in. You can even follow your favorite investors to see what they’ve been investing in and how well those investments have done.
Here’s a referral link to Sofi Invest if you’re interested in investing with them, and when you open an Active Investing account with $5,000 or more, and you’ll get $50 in stock. https://www.sofi.com/share/invest/2629289
Disclaimer: I am not any sort of investment or financial professional giving any sort of legal advice. I’m just some guy trying to teach other people about how they might navigate the financial world.
