It was good while it lasted
I was planning to keep my THEO account for at least the rest of this year, but decided to close it last week instead. It didn’t seem to make much sense to keep putting money into it once I had decided it wasn’t a good fit any more.
We talked about the reasons in the last THEO post.
When I closed the account it had just over 1.6m yen in it (not bad for a couple of years!). I opened a Monex account (for diversification purposes and to gain access to the interface to allow me to help people with it) and will invest that money in Japanese mutual funds.
I’ll also continue putting in the monthly amount I was putting into THEO. Once that is set up we’ll run a post or two about the experience.
So far it was all pretty smooth. I have the option to set up monthly investing (つみたて) into mutual funds with Monex, so that might also be worth exploring.
Anything you can do to automate your saving and investing (reduce friction, increase compliance) is a good thing. We’ll be talking about this on the blog soon.
How about you? Anyone sticking with THEO? For the record I still like them, but those fees are just too high for me.
Hey,
Last month I just started using Theo because I know nothing about finance (yet). I thought it would be a good first step to learn some notions and vocabulary (especially in Japanese).
As you mentioned, the interface of Theo is clean and with the help of Google translate, it is easy to understand.
By the way your website is really helpful and contains a lot of information, thank you. And I bought the NISA guide because I would like to open an account in the future (once I know more about finance).
Thanks! I think THEO is good for people who are not confident enough to handle their investments directly 🙂
Eventually ended up closing mine as well and moving everything to Rakuten. Not that the service is bad, far from it. But it involves lots of transactions which make it hard to follow if you do your own accounting, and the 1% fee is too much. But I would definitely recommend it to someone who doesn’t want to understand how the market works and just wants to pour money in and watch it grow.