This is the first of a series exploring various automated investment services, known as robo advising, offered by more asset managers.

Do your eyes glaze over when you start hearing about financial planning, asset allocation or stock picking?

Even if so, you still might be worried about building a substantial nest egg to purchase a home, pay for college education for your children or even for your retirement.

Many people begin their careers working for companies or government entities that sponsor tax-deferred retirement plans, such as 401(k) or 403(b) plans, but these aren’t available to everyone. Besides, your investment goal may not be retirement, if you have other priorities.

You might also be running your own business, which means you really are on your own when it comes to building up a substantial financial reserve. Or perhaps you have a 401(k) from an old job that you’re able to roll over to an IRA with a wide range of funds to choose from, and you want help with that.

Hiring a financial adviser is a possibility, but it may not work for you. For example, some advisers have account minimums of $1 million or higher, and a typical annual fee is 1% of assets under management.

Your solution may be to use an automated-investment-adviser service. These services are often called “robo advisers,” which may be unfortunate, because the “robo” prefix was tarnished in the aftermath of the 2008 housing crisis when it was revealed that large banks had used “robo-signing” to hasten the foreclosure process on homeowners.

Here’s a glimpse of how one so-called robo adviser works:

How to begin

For our first robo-adviser example, we looked at Liftoff, offered by Ritholtz Asset Management, which is a registered investment adviser launched in September 2013. The company’s CEO is Josh Brown, also known as “The Reformed Broker.” His partner in the endeavor and the chairman of the company is Barry Ritholtz.

For its main investment advisory service, Ritholtz Asset Management has an account minimum of $1 million and charges an annual fee of 1%. That service, according to Brown, includes “heavy-duty financial planning, going way beyond just asset allocation.”

The firm began offering its Liftoff service late last year. Brown said in a recent interview with MarketWatch that he and Ritholtz, because of their “social-media presence,” receive “a lot of inquiries from investors that we cannot meet.”

The idea of the service, according to Brown, is to help young investors who don’t have complicated financial situations to avoid “conflicts on Wall Street” by getting objective advice on investment allocation.

To begin using the robo-adviser service, a prospective client answers a series of questions about risk tolerance, comfort with various asset classes, investment goals, how much they can invest initially and how much more they plan to invest each month.

One feature of the service is that you can go through the series of questions and get a sample portfolio allocation free of charge, based on goals and the amount set aside to invest.

“When you arrive at the page with the portfolio we recommend, you can make any changes or tweaks, and see in real time what the hypothetical returns might be, based on historical data,” Brown said. “You don’t pay anything until you actually fund the account with money.” The annual fee for Liftoff is 0.40%.

“We use only ETFs that trade commission-free at our custodian, TD Ameritrade AMTD, +0.72% , and all these ETFs have fees at the bottom of their category,” Brown said. “So when accounts are rebalanced, the customers trade commission-free as well.”

(It is important to note that Liftoff is just one of many robo-adviser services. For a deeper look into the robo-adviser world and a peek at how human advisers compare with robo advisers read more.)

A sample portfolio

For my example, I pretended to be a 35-year-old with $50,000 to invest immediately who could commit to investing another $1,000 a month toward building a retirement nest egg, with a goal of providing annual income of $100,000 a year.

Since your average investor may not be familiar with how risky various investment classes can be, the questions on risk tolerance used “real life” examples:

Here’s one sample question: “Three weeks before your ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ vacation, you lose your job. What would you do?” Your choices are to cancel the vacation, take a more modest vacation to save money, go as scheduled since you would need time to begin a job search. Or this one: “Extend your vacation since this might be your last chance to go first class.”

After answering the questions and showing a moderate tolerance for risk, our 35-year-old hypothetical investor, Liftoff found, had a low chance of meeting his retirement goal by March 2047. To have a good chance of meeting the goal, I would need to add $7,210 to my initial investment, increase my monthly deposits to $1,050, or retire one year later.

I chose to increase the monthly deposit to $1,100. Keep in mind, this is only an example. The $100,000 goal for annual income might seem high, but we cannot know what inflation will have done between now and 2047. Putting away $1,100 a month, too, might seem high. But the important thing is to understand how vital it is for your future financial health to save money regularly. A good rule of thumb is to consider that if you’re not sacrificing anything to save up money, you probably aren’t saving enough. Make it hurt.

Anyway, after raising my monthly deposit amount, Liftoff said that if I stuck with the plan, I would be “on track” to build a nest egg of $4.3 million by March 2047, with a required minimum annual return of 9.7%.

Here’s the portfolio allocation that was recommended:

This is a well-diversified, fairly conservative long-term allocation.

This type of robo-adviser service may not be for everyone, especially if you are already maximizing contributions to a 401(k) or similar plan. But you might still have a goal of building a nest egg outside of a tax-deferred retirement account, or you might want the robo adviser to run your rollover IRA. This approach could be used, for example, to invest for five or 10 years, with the goal of putting together a hefty down payment to buy a home.

Considering the relatively low annual fee, the choice of ETFs that in turn have low management fees, the avoidance of commission, the periodic portfolio rebalancing and the ability to make changes to risk tolerance, goals or investment amounts, the robo-adviser approach is a viable choice for investors who need help with allocation decisions.

The two biggest independent robo advisers, Betterment and Wealthfront, have together attracted more than $3.4 billion in investor money, and the nascent industry has the potential to attract about $400 billion over time, according to a Goldman Sachs report dated April 10.

That figure is just a drop in the bucket compared with the $12 trillion that U.S. retail investors have in play, according to Goldman. But that is still a sizable bucket for the growing ranks of robo advisers.