[da39a3ee]

If you have planned to contribute $500K then presumably your plan involves making the money liquid with the necessary few days anticipation.

Also, my Wealthfront account is offering me approximately 25% "Available to borrow". I haven't tried it yet but I assume I could grab that immediately and then sell stock to pay back the loan.

I'm not challenging your claim that having a human financial advisor can be useful. I'm sure you're right; I just didn't think your points against the robo service were very strong.

[jonstewart]

I’m a mostly-happy Wealthfront user, but there’s a negative feature of the loan that I found out the hard way. I was having some medium-level renovations done on my house, and pushing the easy button to get some cash without liquidating investments sounded good to me. That worked great! But: WF would not let me add any more to my investment account until I paid the loan back in full! This wasn’t prominent, and I’d have happily made payments for longer by dividing between the loan and investment. I missed out on much of the big upside of the past 20 months.

[romski]

You can create a 2nd investment account and start contributing to that while making minimum payments against your loan.

[onphonenow]

Having been through this a few times betterment at least did not have a way AT ALL to wire out any amount of money regardless of balance in the account. This caused an issue during a real estate transaction - somewhat to extremely painful.

If wealthfront is offering an available to borrow that is perfect (for this issue).

You do get to a point though where you are like - hey, can I transfer $x of stock to a donor advised fund on this day and are just glad it can happen.

I'm not saying the fee is worth it, just that some folks may be willing to pay it because it appears to improve quality of life, even at cost of performance.

And actually, for something like a favor of $500K to help a close, you may NOT be doing a lot of planning in advance. Sure, call me when you need it if it ends up being needed. Call comes in (days / weeks / months later) - now its a pain.

[vineyardmike]

I found betterment was also slow at even just transferring cash out of their accounts to other banks. Would not recommend them for anything that needs speed.

[chris47493]

Their margin loan feature isn't much faster in my experience. ~2 days to open the initial request, 2 days to transfer via ACH, couple more to clear. I don't remember if there was a wire transfer option or not. Overall I still appreciate how easy it was to use

[erik_seaberg]

The Wealthfront happy paths seem to be ACATS transfers of brokerage holdings, or $250k (per day) ACH to/from a bank. They don’t have wire transfers. They can mail checks drawn on a Green Dot cash account but only up to $25k, which probably means they don’t have cashier’s checks.

https://support.wealthfront.com/hc/en-us/articles/3600392637...