There are no options for savings plan in Degiro where as ETFmatic won’t allow you to pick your own ETF. Therefore, I was looking for a platform where I can buy ETFs or funds with an option of savings plan. The only platform which seemed reasonable to me at that time was flatex.
Account opening: Opening of an account is straightforward. You just have to fill in your personal info and get the account verified. After that you are all set to trade stocks, ETFs, funds, CFDs, & forex. The landing and pricing pages are in English but all other pages are in German so either you must know German or use chrome browser with google translate.
Fees: Fees vary from what you want to trade and how often. They have different plans and the details are explained in the price section. You need to be careful as not to keep cash in the account as they charge negative interest rate.!!!! So if you transfer money from your checking account to flatex account and don’t use that money to buy or trade you’ll loose money from that account due to negative interest rate of 0.4%. This is a big drawback!!!!
They have some ETFs for which they don’t charge any brokerage fees except Additional Trading Costs (ATC) but for all others you must pay 1.5 euros plus ATC per transaction. The ATC can vary depending on how much you are investing per month in savings plan.
As an example let’s look at the cost associated with buying 100 Euro worth of iShares Core MSCI World UCITS ETF USD (Acc) per month as a part of savings plan. Recall you must pay TER for ETFs no matter where you buy them.
| Fees (euros) | Degiro | Flatex |
| ATC | 0 | 1.5 Euros |
| Brokerage Fees | 0 | 1.5 Euros |
| Per month | 0 | 3.0 Euros |
| Per year | 0 | 3*12 =36 euros Euros |
| For 10 years | 0 | 36*10=360 Euros |
Assuming that the average return rate is 8% per year with flatex you are only getting 5% whereas with Degiro you’d get 8%. This also means that you must make at least 3% per year with flatex savings plan in order to be break even. I let you decide if it’s worth to pay fees when you can buy it somewhere else without fees :
Verdict: I did open an account with flatex but after looking at the fee structure i decided not to use savings plan option but rather keep buying manually with Degiro .
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