M1 Margin Annoyance
When using a Margin account on M1 you are forced to put cash into your Invest account before the interest payment date each month if you want to avoid having Margin automatically increase your borrowed principle to pay off the interest from month to month.
This means you also have to disable your auto-invest temporarily every month (or more likely all the time, thus defeating half of M1's professed benefits and the core benefit touted of M1's pie system) or set your auto-invest floor above your monthly interest amount (which no one would reasonably want to do since the cash in the Invest account provides no interest or benefit to the investor). Since cash sitting in the invest account makes no interest (in comparison to an earn account) you are effectively "punished" by this setup.
None of these are massive issues, they are little things, a few days a month of minor manual selections, and choices can manage the situation.
However, the design seems to have been specifically created to produce pain points to try to extract extra 'value' for M1. This seems very much in contrast to many of the other touted features of M1.
Perhaps this is something that most people are not bothered by though?
I find it annoying that the system is setup in this manner, it gives me a negative impression of M1 and makes me feel like they specifically designed the system to be predatory.
There is certainly no technical reason why we couldn't have the margin interest pulled from an associated earn account or another bank account, yet that ability is missing. I don't want my Margin principle to ever increase without my purposeful selection, but M1 seems to be playing a game of 'gotcha' with the Margin system, hoping that you slip up so they can make a little bit more money.
The fact that people will likely reply with workarounds is entirely the point that I'm making.
There shouldn't need to be ANY workarounds, it should be a straightforward system of M1 charging interest and the individual paying off the interest through whatever manner they want.
Sure, if a person chooses not to link something like Earn, great, use the margin account to "pay" the interest by borrowing more, fine.
However, the lack of a process that doesn't automatically try to penalize you if you don't arrange your money to not benefit you (sitting in cash reserves, etc.) comes across as a scummy mobile-game-level of predatory.
I wish one of the M1 representatives would chime in on why they think the reputation hit for this behavior and the almost certainly minor increase in interest payments to M1 is somehow worth more than customer satisfaction and company reputation.
I certainly can't recommend the margin system in its current state beyond the fact that the interest rate is competitive and I honestly wish I could! I like M1's setup for everything else, with the exception of the murder of the Spend account, because it was very nice to have all my financials in the same location (plus, that black metal card was weighty and very stylish, couldn't help but like it).