Why you won’t achieve your goals by spending to save

RECENTLY, I came across Instagram ads from Grab touting their Autoinvest feature. The premise is simple: Each time you make any Grab transaction, the app will invest either S$1, S$2 or S$5, depending on your preference, in a mix of short-term fixed-income and money market mutual funds.

Hugosave, another local fintech startup, offers a similar service called Roundups. With each transaction you make using its debit card, the value is rounded up to the the nearest dollar and the excess is invested into gold at the end of each week. The gold is priced based on the XAU physical gold price in Singdollars.

With markets being as volatile as they have been, are these the low-risk, low-cost investment tools that we have been waiting for?