by Ashley
A few months ago, a friend sent me some money they owed me via CashApp. I had to download the app specifically to receive the money, because it’s the only cash-sending app my friend had (I already had Zelle and Venmo but my friend didn’t have either of those). Then a funny thing happened. The money just sat there. I never took the time to hook up CashApp to my bank, so there was no way to “cash out” the funds. It wasn’t a huge sum of money, and I didn’t immediately need it, so it just continued to sit in CashApp, untouched.
Investment Options with CashApp
Until just about a week ago… I logged into CashApp and for the first time noticed you can invest through the app. Even better – the trades are Free! I started poking around a bit. I saw you can invest in Bitcoin and stocks. I started searching the stocks a bit and noticed you and search based on performance. For example, I searched for stocks with performance of 10% or higher over the past year (you can modify and change the % performance and time period). You can buy single stocks or buy into a fund.
I took my little bit of money and threw it into stocks. Why not? I wasn’t missing the money and it was just sitting in CashApp untouched for months anyway. Why not try to see if I could invest it and potentially stand to grow it a bit? I bought Meta (single stock) and SPDR S&P 500 (a fund that’s supposed to track the S&P 500). It’s only been about a week, but I’m already up a couple bucks!
Saving with CashApp
Just today when I logged into CashApp to check out my stocks’ performance, I also noticed they have a high yield savings account option as well! You can earn up to 4.5% interest depending on how much and how often you save. Who knew that CashApp had all these options for saving and investing?
Final Thoughts
I tend to be pretty fiscally conservative and risk-averse. For those reasons, I’m not big into investing in single stocks. I likely wouldn’t have ever invested through CashApp if I wasn’t in a situation wherein I had funds just sitting in CashApp doing nothing. Given that it was a small amount of money, and I could afford to just lose it all together, I’d almost consider this more “entertainment” and a learning experience versus an investment vehicle. I’ll stick to Fidelity for my longer term investments. And for short-term investments, I have about half my Emergency Fund in a 5.25% yield 6-month CD through a CapitalOne360 bank account (currently half-way through the 6 months). The other half of my EF is just in a normal savings account.
I’d love to know if others use CashApp (or another app like RobinHood, etc.) for investing. I truly do not follow the market enough to start investing in single stocks regularly. But when it’s a small sum and viewed just as entertainment, it actually is quite fun to login and see daily changes, etc.
What are your thoughts on investing through apps? Would you ever do it? Why or why not?
