Micro-investing app Stash, launched a couple years ago, has attracted more than 3 million customers, with another 25,000 people signing up each week.
Its demographic is people who lack any experience and/or knowledge about investing. It is also meant for those without deep pockets. The average investor on Stash socks away just $22 a week into their account. But it all builds up and is a solid place to start.
It doesn’t cost a fortune to buy into your own unique investment portfolio: you can launch an account with just $5. This is possible because of fractional shares, which are full shares broken down into smaller, more affordable pieces. It’s investing made easy. And it’s also fast! You can create your Stash account in less than two minutes.
Stash lets you choose your own stocks, and you have a wide array of choices of ETFs.
Now, let’s get to the nitty-gritty about contacting Stash once you have set up an account.
We had high hopes for this option, because many online apps do not offer this. However, it turned out to be somewhat of a dead end.
This message popped up when we clicked to chat online:
“We are currently experiencing a very high volume of customer requests resulting in some delays. If you submit a support ticket, we will respond to your ticket in the order it was received and as soon as we can.”
There is no date on this generic message, so we have no way of knowing if this is temporary and could change, or if it’s more of a permanent reply.
You can send an email message to stash via [email protected] but again, no estimates are given as to when you might get a response.
Many apps, Stash included, try to answer your questions by picking up on key words and then sending you to online answers. We put in a generic question about IRAs and received a link to an online response. Then we were asked if the answer helped us. After we typed “no” it finally connected us to the email link.
We asked a more specific question about making recurring deposits into an IRA, and got the following response to our email:
“Your request has been received and will be reviewed by Stash Support. We're currently experiencing a very high volume of customer requests, resulting in some delays. We'll respond to your ticket in the order that it was received—please do not submit another ticket, as it won't expedite our review.”
Next on the list was the toll-free phone number (800) 205-5164.
After we placed our call, a robo-voice informed us customer service hours are weekdays from 8:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. EST, which seems reasonable and we were calling at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday.
The robo voice said we could leave a number for a call-back, but we wanted to test how long it took to be connected to an actual live Stash support person.
To our genuine surprise, our call was answered after just 13 min and 47 seconds after we dialed, making this the best way to contact Stash.