Hello Grasshoppa,

In today’s society, we often hear people expressing their lack of time to look into their investments or to explore any investments out there. There are also cases where the rich  have lots of money but they have no time to manage or grow their cash. Of course the they can always opt to have a Financial Planner to manage their money but it comes with a cost, but don’t get me wrong, not only the rich can get Financial Planner to manage their money. Average income earners can engage a Financial Planner too but are you willing to pay them to manage your money? Is it worth it to engage a Financial Planner? If you ask me, the answer is yes if you are able to find a good Financial Planner & you really have limited time.

But if you are willing to allocate some time to learn about investment & able to allocate time to manage your investment portfolio, manage your own investment portfolio can be an option for you. Does that mean that you have to spend a few hours a day to be on screen like those stock traders you watch in movies? The answer is NO. Learning about investment may take awhile but managing it can be as minimal as 2 hours a month.

Automated investment is not something new in the market as I used to have monthly deduction for the Mutual Fund that I used to invest in. That was back in 2009 but now with more options & opportunities to invest in various types of investments & platforms, it may be challenging for us to monitor or manage your investment from time to time. In Malaysia, there are plenty of investment platforms that are adopting automated investment to ease your busy lifestyle.

In my view, automating investment can be done in 2 ways. Firstly, it can be done in the form of dollar cost averaging where you will be allocating & investing based on your fixed investment amount on monthly basis. For me, I am doing this for my PRS & Gold Investment where I will be investing between RM200 – RM250 once I have received my monthly salary. Another form of automated investment is where I will be putting a lump sum of money in that platform & set it under auto invest or they will deduct a fixed amount of money by standing instruction on a monthly basis. It really depends on how convenient you want it to be & most of the investment platform are able to automate your investment.

Which Are The Investment Platforms That Have Automated Investment?

1. FSMONE (Formerly Known as Fundsupermart)
They are the market leader when it comes to Mutual Fund & PRS investment platform. Their Regular Saving Plan (RSP) allows you to invest in most of their available funds & they even offer Insurance & RSP Bundle. Personally I am still investing my PRS manually as I find that there is no need for me to automate my PRS as I may invest more whenever I have extra savings.

2. StashAway 
StashAway has been one of my best performing investments in 2019. My to date return is at 18.2%. PS : I am investing in their highest risk investment. You may setup their Direct Debit with one time or recurring option.

3. Fundaztic 
You are able to enroll in their SmartInvest program but their minimum condition is you need to have minimum RM2000 balance in your fund. Their maximum auto investment is only up to 5 active investments which means that you have to manually set this up each time you have reached 5 investments. For Fundaztic, currently I am doing manual investment for all their active Notes.

4. FundingSociety 
They have Auto Invest Bots where you can finance based on Business Term Financing, Accounts Payable Financing & Accounts Receivable Financing. You can also include the industry, interest rate (p.a.), timeline (months) & investment amount (min & max). Their auto invest is important as I personally have no chance to invest manually due to high demand on their Notes.

5. HelloGold 
They have a program called SmartSaver where you are able to buy Gold every working day at their lowest price. Their setup is pretty straight forward. You just have to pick your goal & setup the comfortable amount that you would like to invest. Once you select the goal, you can either select Direct Debit or you can opt for manual payment via other platform such as Boost. I am using Boost due to their cashback but after their recent changes, I may opt for their Direct Debit.

Conclusion :

Investment requires discipline & patience as it is a long term habits. There are no shortcuts in investment unless you are in “Money Game” or other investment scam. LOL. If you are in it for long term, there is no harm to setup any automated investment to cope with your busy schedule. Once your setup is done, you can sit back, relax & enjoy your investment return in the upcoming years to come but don’t forget to monitor it from time to time just in case you need any rebalance for your investment. Just like your Netflix or Spotify subscription where it will be deducted monthly from your credit card, you can do exactly the same for your investment with deduction from your bank account.

OSS!