Personal Finance, StashAway

My Honest Review on StashAway and Monthly Returns

4 min readDec 29, 2019

My Honest Review on StashAway and Monthly Returns. money — Photo Source: Canva

Want a no-brainer investment tool with 0 management fee? Check out my following review of StashAway, a robo-advisor from Singapore.

As a fresh grad back in 2019, I did not have much capital and experience in dealing with active investment options like stocks and derivatives. So I decided to put some money into StashAway and see how it goes. Here are some other reasons why I chose it:

It’s regulated. It has a full capital-markets services license (CMS) from the Monetary Authority of Singapore, and the Securities Commission in Malaysia. It’s using own proprietary investment strategy (ERAA), that harnesses economic trends to maximise our returns at the risk level that feels right to you. So, you can choose
No active monitoring needed. If you do not have any financial knowledge or you are too lazy to do any research, here you go. Put some money and leave it there. Or you can choose fixed deposit.
Withdrawal at any time. Unlike a fixed deposit which I will lose the return if I withdraw before the set period, I can withdraw my fund anytime I want at StashAway. But, there will be a 0.1% currency conversion charge by Citibank Malaysia as you deposit/withdraw in RM. This fee is embedded in the FX rate.
Goal-based portfolios: It has 2 types of portfolios — general and goal-based portfolios. But I prefer goal-based as it provides calculation to show how much you need in order to reach your goals.

6. Adjustable portfolio based on your risk appetite. This is what I love the most as I can switch the risk index at any time for my portfolio! It has 2 categories:

Balanced portfolio growth: 6.5% to 22%
More risk: 26% to 36%

*The percentage means there’s 1% chance that your portfolio’s value will lose more than xx% of its value in any given year

[UPDATE October 2020], the team came up with Stashaway Simple, which is a cash management fund in essence. They’re projecting returns of up to 2.4% p.a. Compared to Fixed Deposit (FDs), if you uplift your FD prematurely, you lose all interest you were meant to gain. There’s no such thing as Stashaway Simple, you get great liquidity that you can withdraw your money anytime.

7. Breakdown of investment. Monthly Statements will be sent to your account where you can check for the performance of each investment asset in your portfolio. You can duplicate the investment if you have access to US markets.

[UPDATE Jan 2021] But the reason why I continued using it till now (2021) is because of its recovery post March 2020 — the big tank due to covid-19. I was surprised by how fast the algorithm changed (about 1 month) and started picking up again. And since then I had been depositing money into StashAway religiously.

Let’s start with the onboarding process. It took 1–2 business days to get document (IC) approval. And up to 5–7 business days for the first Direct Debit. Overall the process was pleasing as I can attach my documents and inquire about StashAway via Whatsapp. Pretty convenient.

Moving onto the RETURN! I forgot to update this article, so there’s a huge chunk missing, but you get the gist of it.