SoFi Blog

It’s that time of year again: back to school time. And while students are anxious to walk through their school halls, check off their back to school lists, and make sure they have plenty of friends in every class, graduates may be struggling to pay off their debt.

Unfortunately, student loan debt is at an all-time high and continues to rise. The average student loan debt for 2017 graduates was $39,400 amounting to $1.48 trillion in total student loan debt. This exceeds the amount of credit card debt in the United States by $694 billion.

In the summer of 2016, we surveyed around 1,000 young professionals for The Impact of Student Loan Benefits, a white paper outlining the effect of student loan debt on employee recruitment. We found over 60% of respondents reported that student loan debt is one of the top two financial concerns in their lives. While student loans are clearly a stressor for millennials, there’s a way to prevent them from causing students so much anxiety.

By Tony Morosini, VP of Banking

There’s no question deposit accounts are having a moment. In a rising rate environment, banks earn an increasing yield on the deposits they hold, and these additional proceeds can often go directly to earnings. To gather more deposits, banks fight to get consumers to switch banks, but it’s a tough sell because changing banks is painful.

While lots of institutions are offering deals to entice people to move their accounts, they haven’t invested in making the consumer experience as good as it should be. People have been using and managing money online at scale for 20 years, and we’ve now gotten to a place where people are not just comfortable with handling money online, but they expect it. The traditional financial institutions have improved on some marks, like improving their mobile experiences (or at least creating one at all), but there’s still a lot of space to tackle.

You’ve probably heard the stats about the gender pay gap in America: Women today earn $0.81 for every dollar that men do—which, over the course of a career, can means hundreds of thousands of lost wages.

Here at SoFi, we want to do everything we can to help you attain everything you’re entitled to. Sometimes, that means researching your market value and asking your employer for more. Other times, it might mean looking for a new role, with higher pay and more opportunity for advancement.

But there’s something else you can do to close the gender wage gap—something that might be even more powerful.

Studies show millennial women have enormous power—when it comes to spending, that is. But what about when it comes to building wealth, like saving and investing toward the future? To figure that out, SoFi teamed up with Levo to survey 2,050 millennial women on their behaviors and motivations around financial habits, with intriguing results.

Millennials get a bad rap when it comes to personal finance. They’re often labeled as unprepared for the future or emergencies because they don’t save enough, if anything at all. However, of the women surveyed, 53% have an emergency savings fund set aside (covering three to six-plus months of housing and necessities). And they don’t just keep their money under the bed: 70% review their bank accounts at least once a week. These findings indicate millennial women are much more financially responsible than they’re given credit for, in that they are savers and have cash flow to invest.

At SoFi Invest, our mission is simple: We want to help you make the smartest investment decisions possible so that you can continue on the path to your goals.

That’s why we constantly monitor the market, the economy, and your personal Invest portfolio. Each month we discuss the economy, update our forecasts based on what the market is doing, and every now and then tweak the allocations within our member portfolios. This is one of those times.

Below, we’re sharing the updates we’ve made to all five risk strategies: Conservative, Moderately Conservative, Moderate, Moderately Aggressive, and Aggressive. When it comes to your investments, we always want to be transparent and keep you in the loop about adjustments that we’re making to help your money grow.