I love when banks and financial services providers use the automatic savings angle in the marketing.
It’s such a powerful tool for savers, and even though it’s obviously in the bank or investment house’s best interest to get money coming in on a regular basis, it’s also in the saver’s interest to regularly contribute to their short-term savings or retirement.
So when I got the following email from Vanguard — my investment house of choice — I was happy to see their marketing angle:
Save more with less hassle
Dear Vanguard client,Automatic investing is a free account option that can help you meet your long-term goals. You can set up a schedule to move money from your bank account to your Vanguard account automatically. With this service, you:
- Decide how much money you want to add to your Vanguard account.
- Choose how often you want to make contributions (weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.).
- Let us handle the transactions for you.
It’s easy to get set up
Put automatic investing to work toward your goal and free up valuable time. Select Get started now below and click Automatic investing under Automatic transactions. It only takes a few minutes.
Vanguard’s “Automatic investing” section on their website — the link that this email leads you to — isn’t that built-out; it’s essentially a page describing how you can automatically move money from your bank to Vanguard (or from Vanguard to your bank) as part of an automatic investing plan.
Automatic investments allow you to move money from an authorized bank on file into an existing Vanguard account. If you’d like to move money to your bank or between your non-retirement and Vanguard Brokerage IRA, please use our automatic withdrawal feature.
Since Vanguard isn’t known to be a company that does a lot of over-the-top sales marketing, it doesn’t shock me that they don’t have a ton of content on the benefits of automatic investing — but it’s something they should consider, especially since the crux of everything we talk about falls within their investment philosophy: investing in index funds, dollar cost averaging and keeping your fees low.
