Stockpile Review and Free $5 of Stock

Updated: 15 Oct 2017

Lately I have been looking at stock related sites and applications, and I ran across Stockpile - it is a site that I have seen before but never really did a deep dive into it.  I had an offer for a free $5 of stock, so I decided to give it a try.

If you have no clue what a stock is, go here ( https://learn.stockpile.com/2017/06/24/what-is-stock/ ) and then come back.  If you are ready to get started with a free $5 of stock, scroll to the bottom if not keep reading.

The process for setting up the account was fairly easy, and instead of the Apple stock that the offer initially showed I decided to go with Ford (F) for two reasons 1) right now the dividend shows up as being almost 5% and 2) I like Ford.  One of the really neat things about Stockpile is that you can own part of a share - so if you can't afford a single Google stock (almost $1000 right now) you can still get a certain $ value worth of it.

The next day my order was executed, and I owned a partial share in Ford.  Specifically, the share was selling at $11.95 so my $5 got me 0.41841 shares.  Since Ford does pay dividends, I read up on the Stockpile support area and found out that they can reinvest the dividends into the same company without any extra fees.  Why does this matter?  Now every time Ford pays dividends, the money goes right back into getting more Ford stock.  This is a great "set it and forget it" approach that allows the stock to slowly increase in shares if the company pays dividends.

$5 of Ford stock

As I started to look around the Stockpile website, I started to realize how well the company has targeted a specific market.  Stockpile seems like the perfect option for someone that wants to provide a gift to a child (either a young child or a teenager) as an investment opportunity and a chance to learn about stocks.  Here are my reasons for coming to this conclusion:

1) Stockpile focuses on providing information for someone who is new to stocks and wants to learn.  They have an entire section on their website ( https://learn.stockpile.com/ ) and they have a "A Rookie's Guide to Investing in the Stock Market" mini-book that you can purchase.

2) Stockpile has an online gift store with many various options of cards that can be targeted to the person you are giving the gift to such as:

- Generic cards (For example "Your Favorite Stock" & "Your Favorite Index ETF")
- Company specific cards (For example Disney, Facebook, Apple & Tesla )
- Theme based cards (For example "Own a piece of your favorite..." and various options like "car company" or "gaming company")
- You can get bundles of cards with the "A Rookie's Guide to Investing in the Stock Market" mini-book that I mentioned earlier, making it a great little kit.

This allows the flexibility to target the gift to the person.  The card itself costs more than the face value ( for example a $50 card costs $56.95 ) but that means the gift giver is taking care of fees and the recipient gets stocks for the face value ($50 in my example) of the card.

3) You can get cards at local stores (seems to be Lowes and Target mainly) but that is just based on what the website says, I didn't personally check.

4) You can send the gift as an "e-gift" if you don't want to deal with an actual gift card.

5) No monthly fees or other maintenance costs, the only fee most people would run into is the 99 cents cost when they decide to sell the stock.

6) Stockpile allows a UTMA (Uniform Transfer to Minors Act) account that is owned by a minor but managed by an adult (the custodian) but the custdian doesn't have to be a parent.  More info: https://learn.stockpile.com/2017/07/21/what-is-an-utma-account/

I am very impressed with Stockpile.  Like any product or company they have a target audience, and I think they are a great option for giving stocks as a gift either for novelty or educational purposes.

Disclosure: This post contains an affiliate link, which means that if you sign up using my link, I’ll receive compensation.  However, all opinions are my own and I actually tried Stockpile and wrote this review before joining the affiliate program to get my readers the unique offer below.

Update (Feb 2022): Stockpile no longer has a referral program, but I think you can still go to ( https://www.stockpile.com/affiliate?utm_source=stockpile&utm_medium=freestocksupport&utm_campaign=support ) and get $5 free worth of stock.

If you want another option to try and more free stock, check out my review of Robinhood:
http://bigboystoys13.blogspot.com/2017/09/robinhood-free-or-near-free-stock.html

If you want to see other freebies/offers, go here:
http://bigboystoys13.blogspot.com/2016/11/get-some-free-stuff-or-free-money.html