Any experience with Schwab Roth IRA?

Investing
#1

I opened my Roth IRA with Schwab a few years back and after taking the course I’m realizing that although the account is a free it is a “Schwab Intelligent Portfolio”. Maybe I’m wrong, but seems that Schwab picks everything in my portfolio based upon my desired portfolio goals/risks. Does anyone else have a Schwab Roth IRA and know how you can pick and purchase ETF funds yourself? I’d prefer to choose my own ETF and especially don’t want my portfolio allocated to Cash (currently the account has a set amount always to Cash).

Would love any insight from fellow Schwab users. Otherwise any insight on how to transfer my Roth IRA to another brokerage account?

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#2

You can just open up a new Roth IRA and transfer the funds and close the Intelligent Portfolio account. Schwab should be able to help with this. As @vivitron mentioned in several threads you’re looking at an “in kind” transfer so you shouldn’t have to see off assets unless you want to.

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#3

Yes, Schwab intelligent advisor is their version of a robo-advisor, similar to wealthfront, betterment, etc. Automated Investing | Schwab Intelligent Portfolios

Schwab does offer normal Roth IRA accounts and like Chad says, you can create a new one and transfer your assets from one to another without any issue.

PS: These robo-advisor accounts are not all-bad, they usually are a basket of low-cost ETF’s. They do some automatic re-balancing and adjust to a risk level that you can set. I have a good amount of my IRA money in a Wealthfront robo account. I don’t think it would be wrong to keep that account open while opening and funding a “manual” IRA for future investments if you want to watch them side by side for a period of time. Just keep it simple and invest early and often :wink:

Thanks!

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#4

Thanks for the response. I really like the robo-advisor option especially since I am newer to investing. The only thing I don’t like is that even having the most aggressive portfolio Schwab was still allocating a higher portion as cash than other accounts. I do like the idea of opening a “manual” IRA and watching them side by side for a bit. Thanks for the great idea.

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#5

Yea, strange they would keep so much in cash, definitely do not want that. One last suggestion I left out - consider a target date index fund (within the manual IRA). This is like a “super simple” robo advisor that offers re-balancing and reallocating over time. I’d say you get almost all of the benefits of any robo or manual strategy with 1% of the effort (all you do is buy one index fund and repeat!).