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When it comes to building a dividend income portfolio, our preferred broker to invest with is Robinhood. This broker allows customers to buy and sell stocks listed in the U.S. for >buy and sell stocks listed in the U.S. for $0 commission< commission.
Yes, that’s right – $0 commission!
It is a great tool for investors, like myself who have limited funds to invest.
On a given month, we have anywhere from $100 to $1,000 to invest. A zero dollar commission broker like Robinhood allows us to buy as little as 1 share of stock. That helps us to continually invest every month – even if it is only $100 or less.
While Robinhood offers my wife and I a way to build our portfolio without costly commissions, there are 2 items that I would like to see them add.
1. Link to Personal Capital
After Robinhood, I would say my next favorite personal finance tool would be Personal Capital. This tool has allowed our family to track our net worth rather quickly.
By linking our credit cards, bank accounts, and investment accounts – we are able to login any time and see a snapshot of our finances.
Personal Capital lets us link about 90% of our financial accounts. Unfortunately, linking our Robinhood account to this tool is currently not available.
According to the Personal Capital site – “Robinhood does not currently allow access to Personal Capital to link your account(s).”
Well that kinda stinks!
This isn’t gonna make us stop investing with Robinhood but it can be a little frustrating. Since we are actively checking our finances in Personal Capital, once a month I manually update our stock holdings from Robinhood.
Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to link your Robinhood account to Personal Capital? I sure think so.
2. Custodial Accounts
It is amazing how priorities tend to change. A few years ago I would have never thought about setting up a custodial account for any of my kids.
Now that my oldest is almost a teenager, setting up a custodial account for him has become a priority. I just wished Robinhood would offer these types of accounts.
According to the Robinhood FAQ – “In the future, we hope to support joint, custodial, and IRA account types.”
Setting up a joint account would be nice. But for my family, having the option of setting up a custodial account with zero commission trades for our son would be awesome.
I have made it a goal to teach him about investing in the stock market and building a dividend income portfolio at a young age. A Robinhood account would be a great way to actually get started.
Past Improvements
Despite wanting a way to link our Robinhood account to Personal Capital and offering custodial accounts … it seems that Robinhood is constantly improving their product.
A while ago I wrote another post about the 3 Things I Don’t Like About Using Robinhood. My wife and I had recently started using the zero commission broker and liked a lot of things about it. However, there were a couple things that really stood out as issues at the time.
Our major complaints included –
- No Transaction History for Dividends
- Monthly Statements Hard to Read
- No Download Functionality
Since writing that post, Robinhood now includes your dividends in your “History”. Yeah!
This was a big deal for me to be able to see the dividends we received when they came in. The only option at the time was to wait for your monthly statement to come out the following month.
Big Improvement!
As far as the monthly statements are concerned – I stopped reading them since the dividend history is included. They are still a bit cumbersome reading from a phone. But I can use our iPad instead if I really want to read them.
Would be nice to get them emailed to you or at least available via their website.
Finally, I haven’t really needed any download functionality as it turns out. I keep a separate google sheet with all of our stock purchases and sales on my own. I kinda like the manual step of doing this and stay on top of it.
I can see this being a big deal though for investors who don’t stay up on their stock purchases as much as I do though.
And in case you are brand new to Robinhood, you can only access your account via a mobile app. Unlike other stock brokers that have web logins, Robinhood is only accessible via the app. That can make it hard for reading statements, downloading data, etc.
Conclusion
Overall, I still love using Robinhood to invest in dividend stocks. We currently hold over $12,000 worth of stock through this broker and that number continues to grow every month.
However, I believe that Robinhood still has a long way to grow. For example, allowing customers to link to their Personal Capital account would be great.
Offering different kinds of accounts (other than personal) would also help a bunch. I know that our family would love to see the option for custodial accounts.
But all in all … Robinhood is still a great tool for dividend investors to leverage.
Do you use Robinhood to invest? What features would you like to see them add?
