Reading constant articles like the tweet shown below, which talks about the three steps to be rich, I thought it wouldn’t be too hard for me to attempt to use that ideology by making an Acorns account and getting the mobile app.

Investment in Acorn terms means you take the money out of the linked account you choose and is in Acorn accounts safely. Acorns have two accounts, one called Core, and one called Later. The core is an investment account that has a portfolio that divests the investments into 6 different stocks, but with different amounts into each stock depending on which portfolio you pick. You can also set a recurring investment of a minimal $5 weekly, meaning you can save $260 yearly at the very least.

Later is a retirement account (IRA) that operates the same as the Core account except you can add beneficiaries, people you want to look out for. Also, the portfolio is age-based and guides you through your journey with any IRA you choose. You can see your potential, a pie chart of the stocks and graph of future earnings on how your money is fairing depending on the day. I had days when I had little as $10 go to $15, or the $10 go to $10.02, but it was showing me how stocks were working.

The best feature of Acorns that helped me was round-ups. Acorns operating system is based using spare change. This means whatever you purchase for example was a receipt of $36.42, it will round up to the nearest dollar. So that is $0.58 cents of spare change. This spare change gets reverted to investments to your core account. Another feature of it is a multiplier, which mine was at 2x the nearest dollar. Meaning when I would go out and buy little things every week, I would see a spare change of $5 weekly I collected get doubled due to the multiplier. This also indicated I bought food more than 2–3 times in a week, very alarming no matter how small the purchase was.

So Acorns would take the spare change of $10 that I hadn’t spent and left me $10 shorter. This made me quickly realize that my mom really was right about my bad habits (not that I doubted her). All these features can be turned off, but I decided to keep them so I wouldn’t be tempted to spend more as this was my own monitor on my finances. By a month I already saved $50, but then I made a mistake.