Many people reevaluate their financial situations in the new year, and many now turn to mobile personal finance apps for their ease, convenience, and expediency. Mobile apps, by their very nature, are designed to help you do something quickly and efficiently. The Stash Invest iPhone app specializes in helping mobile users get started investing. From the app, you can buy, sell, and monitor investment funds, with as little as $5 to start. It's a rather simple app that would benefit from additional features and notification options, but it does succeed in helping you get started investing quickly. If your personal finance goals are less about investing and more about getting a handle on your money, analyzing your spending habits, creating budgets, and so forth, Stash Invest is not the app you need—Editors' Choice Mint is.

Costs
Stash Invest is free to download, and the minimum investment is only $5. But, as with most investing services, there are fees for using the service. For users with less than $5,000 in the app, Stash Invest gives you the first three months free and then charges $1 per month. That subscription fee comes out of your connected bank account, not your investments. Account holders with $5,000 or more invested pay 0.25 percent of their account balance per year.

Using Stash Invest
I walked through the setup process with Stash Invest, but I didn't actually want to open a new investment account, so I asked the company to set me up with a test account. During setup, you will need to divulge a little bit of personal information, as you are opening an actual financial account.

Not all personal finance apps have you set up a new financial account. Many simply monitor your existing accounts. We're starting to see a few more mobile finance apps that open savings or investing accounts for you, though, including Qapital (for iPhone only). Qapital is an app that routinely adds money to a new savings account based on rules you set. Acorns is another one, and it more closely resembles Stash Invest. In Acorns, you open a new investment account and use the app to quickly and easily add money to your account, change your invest strategy, and so on. 

During setup, the app asks you to create a numeric PIN to lock the app. Bear in mind that anyone who were to break into your Stash Invest account can make trades directly from the app, so it's important to take that PIN seriously. While you're at it, make sure your username and password are unique and strong. For added security, you should log out of the app entirely, rather than just lock it with the PIN, when you're finished using it.

Once your Stash Invest account is ready, you can add money to start investing by transferring it from a connected bank account. The app home screen always shows how much money you have available to invest, as well as your investment balance, total return in dollars, and total return as a percent.

The Acorns app asks you more questions during setup than Stash Invest about you, your net worth, whether you are a short-term or long-term investor, and your investment goals. And it offers round-up investments, e.g., I can set a rule such that any time I use a certain credit card, Acorns will round up my transaction to the nearest whole dollar and stick that change into my investment account. Stash Invest is better, however, at letting you explore the kinds of funds into which you might want to put your money. 

To start investing, you can explore various investment funds offered through Stash Invest. The app does not offer individual stocks, only funds, although you can read about a fund and see exactly what it comprises. For example, a fund called Social Media Mania contains about 11 percent stock in LinkedIn, 10 percent in Facebook, 4 percent in Yahoo! Inc., and so forth. In addition to this information, Stash Invest gives you a Risk Level rating, shown both in words (conservative, moderate, aggressive) and on a slider bar.

Investing Your Money
Stash Invest has neat tools for exploring new funds and investment opportunities that it features in the app. An option called Copy the Experts, for example, puts your money into the holdings of some of the top hedge funds. A Discover button brings up different lists of funds you can explore based on causes or ideas you believe in, such as Equality Works, Defending America, and Clean & Green. While you can bookmark funds that catch your eye, and you can see details about each fund, such as its growth over time, the app doesn't give you any comparison tools. Many apps for monitoring stocks, such as Investing.com, are all about showing comparisons that let you see which stocks have done better over given periods of time.

That said, Investing.com is only for monitoring stocks and your portfolio, but not actively managing them. Stash Invest is for hands-on buying and selling.

With Investing.com, I made the mistake of allowing notifications and had to disable them within 30 minutes. The default settings for that app push way too much information about every little change in the market and breaking financial news. Stash Invest, on the other hand, offers only vague notifications settings. It's not at all obvious what most of them do. I wish there were more information about these notifications, or more detailed options for notification.

The buy and sell options are also simplified and limited. You can buy or sell investments in funds. You can buy or sell any value of a fund, and that's it. With other investing services, you usually have the option to place a buy limit order or a stop order. If you don't know what those options mean, then Stash Invest might be a good beginner tool for you. But if you're a more experienced investor, you might find Stash Invest too simple.

While Stash Invest gives you reading material about different funds, it doesn't provide any educational information about investing in general. LearnVest, however, is as much a financial education service as it is a personal finance management tool. It's filled with articles about money-management practices.

Stash Is Simple
Stash Invest is a convenient app for helping less experienced investors get their money into investment funds quickly, while also providing simple tools to watch and manage funds. More experienced investors will find the service light on features. The app needs more detail in its notifications settings so users can understand what they can expect. Stash Invest is a good app with a specific purpose, but it's not a one-stop app for getting a handle on your personal finances. For that, check out Mint, our Editors' Choice among personal finance software and mobile apps.