The future of investing may be with technology, as automated investment services and robo-advisors promise to make investing easy, inexpensive and maybe even fun.

New Mexico Living’s resident technology expert Nyika Allen explains how this works. “It’s probably not as ‘science-fiction’ as you’re thinking. It’s really just an online wealth management service that provides an automated algorithm-based portfolio management advice. So instead of having a human there, being your financial planner, it’s all algorithm based. And so that really cuts down on a lot of the price involved, which makes it a lot lower cost. It also means a lower account minimums as well so it can be flexible.”

Listing a few top recommended robo-advisors:

Bettermint
Founded 2008 – Registered with SEC – Based in NYC
Offers taxable and tax advantage investment accounts (including traditional, ROTH IRA, etc)
185K + Customers – $5.5B USD assets
No Investment Minimums – tiered account fees

Wealth Front
Founded 2008 – Based in Palo Alto, CA
Specialized in tax-loss investing; also retirement & non-retirement accounts as well as joint accts and trusts.
$2.6B USD assets managed

Future Advisor
Founded in 2010 – Based in San Francisco – invested in directly by Fidelity so easy to cross-platform manage all Fidelity accts. via service.
Free management of educational investment accts.
$600M USD assets managed