The Only Stock App to Earn Credit Card Style Points! Silo FULL Review

Over the past year, you've probably heard me talking about Silo in multiple videos. Silo. For those that are not familiar, Silo is the investing platform that gives you credit card style rewards points on your stock and bond holdings. So just like how Bilt shook up the industry, allowing people to earn points on paying rent and mortgages, Silo has done the same thing, but for holding stocks in an account. You earn points on the balance of your portfolio. Now, at the start, you could just redeem Silo points for cashback. But the big update is that they've just added their travel portal and their first two airline transfer partners are coming very soon. We'll tell you all about it in this video. Hey, credit warriors. Welcome to the show. My name is Ben Hedges, aka The Credit Shifu. And on this channel, I cover US credit cards, personal finance and luxury travel. If you like the sound of that, please subscribe. But let's get into it. Oh, and Silo did reach out to me to review the new updates that they've just added on their platform. But I'll do my best just to give you all the information in a balanced way. And you can make up your own mind what you think. So like we said, Silo is the only investing platform that gives you points on your brokerage account balance. To understand just how revolutionary that is, think about this. Credit cards reward you for spending. So you spend more. MIT studies have shown that this is a real effect. But Silo rewards you for saving and investing your money. So in theory, you would be incentivized to save and invest more, which is actually way healthier if you think about it. So here's how it works. Silo pays out points based on your account balance at a rate of 0.5 points per dollar you have in your account, whether that money is invested in stocks or sitting there in cash. They pay out monthly based on your average balance for that month. So for example, if your account balance was $100,000, you would earn 50,000 points for the year paid out as 4,166 points per month. In cashback terms, that is worth $41.60. But with transferable points, it can end up being worth more. At 2 cents per point, it's near $83. At 3 cents per point, it's around $124 or so. But that all depends on what transfer partners we ultimately get access to with Silo and on how good you are at redeeming the points. I don't know any other platform that does this, though. So it's something really unique. And in case you're wondering, with Silo, you can do regular brokerage accounts, traditional IRAs, Roth IRAs, rollover IRAs. And if you want some other kind of account, like various types of trusts or whatever, you can reach out to them because they do support more niche accounts that aren't advertised publicly. Now, I do need to tell you about the status tiers that Silo has. The gold plan, which has an annual fee of $240, gives you points on up to $100,000 in your portfolio, meaning 50,000 points a year. Like the example I showed a moment ago. So using 1 cent per point as the value and accounting for the annual fee, you would be making $260 on top of any gains you got in the stock market. Then there is the platinum plan, which costs $960 per year, but allows you to earn points on $500,000 worth of your portfolio. That earns you 250,000 points per year at 1 cent per point. That's $2,500 in value. Then if we minus the annual fee of $960, it gives you $1,540 in profit on top of any gains or dividends from your stocks. But within these plans, larger portfolio sizes unlock additional status benefits. With the gold plan, at $150,000 portfolio size, Silo will reimburse your Amex Blue Cash Preferred annual fee, which is $95. At a $200,000 portfolio, Silo will reimburse not only your Blue Cash Preferred fee, but also your Costco Executive Membership fee, which is $130 per year. When we add that to the points you earn at 1 cent per point minus the annual fee, we get $485 in value. With the platinum plan, at a $750,000 portfolio, Silo will reimburse your Amex Gold annual fee and your Costco Executive Membership. At a $1,000,000 portfolio, Silo will not only reimburse your Amex Gold and your Costco Executive Membership, but also your Amex Platinum annual fee of $895. The total value of that reimbursement is $1,350, and when we add it to the value of the points and then minus the annual fee for the account, we get $2,890 per year in value from that account, on top of all the growth and dividends you get from stocks. Another cool thing is, if you don't have the Amex Platinum or Gold, but instead have cards from Citi, Chase or Capital One, they are willing to pay your annual fees on those cards instead if you reach out to them. Now, in addition to unlocking extra benefits from gold and platinum status, there is an additional way new users can earn more points. Just like credit cards do welcome bonuses, well guess what? So does Silo, but only for my viewers. So for the Gold plan, Silo is offering up to a 100,000 point sign-up bonus, and for the Platinum plan, Silo is offering up to 250,000 points as a sign-up bonus. Combined with the monthly points, that means you can earn up to 500,000 points within the first year with just one account, and you're actually allowed four accounts per social security number, so you could open multiple. You can access that deal with my link down below. But now you've earned a load of Silo points, what can you actually do with them? What are your redemption options? Well, the most basic redemption is cashback at one cent per point. That's pretty straightforward. The second redemption option is to use the Silo travel portal, which has just launched. You can book hundreds of different flights and hotels from airlines and hotel chains that you already know, including all the big names. Look, here's how easy that is. I really like how you can filter by brand when you search for a hotel, since if you have the Amex Platinum, which Silo will pay your annual fee on, you're going to have Hilton Gold status from that card, and you'll get extra benefits, so you might want to stay at a Hilton, for example. And searching for flights as well is also really smooth. The interface is easy to use. You've got this cool map, and I was able to find reasonably priced flights in both dollars and points. And then the third redemption option, which isn't live yet but is coming very soon, is transferring points to airline and hotel partners, just like all the big credit card companies let you do with their points. Silo has already decided on their first two transfer partners, which will be announced within a month. I can't tell you what they are, but you will know soon. Then what other partners are going to be added after the initial two? Well, on the airline front, in the pipeline, they have Etihad, Turkish, Qantas, LATAM, Cathay Pacific, Air France, KLM, Air Canada, Avianca, Ethiopian Airlines, Air India, Ever Air, Frontier, Alaska, Copa Airlines, and Virgin Atlantic. And for hotels, they have Accor, Wyndham, Shangri-La, Hilton, and Choice Hotels. So they should end up with a competitive suite of options to transfer your points to. So for me, once they add transfer partners, that's when I really see silo points starting to compete with Amex, Chase, etc. You can get a lot more than one cent per point in value if you know what you're doing with transfer partners. I got six cents per Chase point transferring to United and booking their Polaris business class, for example. But all right, it's all well earning points, but you wouldn't want to put your money into a brokerage that doesn't have a good track record and risk that capital just to get some extra points. So you may wonder where silo assets are held. Well, silo holds customer assets at Interactive Brokers LLC or IBKR, one of the largest, most established broker dealers in the world. Through Interactive Brokers, you get $5 million in FDIC insurance and $500,000 in SIPC insurance. And silo itself does not actually have custody of any of your assets. Everything is held with IBKR. And in the unfortunate event that silo goes under, your silo account will simply become a regular IBKR account. So I think that's a pretty good overview of how silo works, the different membership tiers and the rewards program. I hope you guys have found it useful. Leave your comments below. And if you want to try out silo for yourself, go to silomarkets.com slash ben or click the link down below. Remember, if you want to take advantage of that up to 250,000 point welcome bonus, it only runs until transfer partners start, which is within the next month. Please subscribe to our channel for more reviews of financial products. And we'll see you in the next video. Bye bye.