When it comes to investing, I am a huge fan of automation.
That is because automating our investing strategy comes with two major benefits:
- We are taking advantage of dollar cost averaging (not trying to time the market)
- We are putting our wealth accumulation on auto pilot (don’t have to think about investing)
However, how does one actually automate their investing strategy?
In today’s post, we’ll be going over a step-by-step guide (with screenshots) on how to set up and cancel automatic investing with Vanguard.
Let’s dive in.
Full Disclosure: Nothing on this site should ever be considered advice, research or an invitation to buy or sell securities, please see my ‘’ page for a full disclaimer.
Vanguard Automatic Investing Quick Tip: ETFs & Mutual Funds
Before diving into the guide, there is one important thing to note.
Vanguard automatic investing can only be done with mutual funds. In other words, Vanguard does not allow for automatic investing with ETFs.
However, this is not a Vanguard-specific issue.
That is because ETFs trade like stocks and their prices fluctuate throughout the day whereas mutual funds only trade once a day. As a result, Vanguard (or any other brokerage firm) can not make automatic investments in ETFs.
How to Set Up Automatic Investments at Vanguard
1. Select “Profile and Account Settings”
After logging into your Vanguard account, you’ll be taken to the “Personal Investors” homepage.
From there, you’ll want to select the “Profile and Account Settings” option at the top right of the screen.
2. Select “Automatic Investment” under either the Quick Links or Banking Tab
After being taken to the “Profile & Account Settings” page, there are two options that we can select in order to get to the “Automatic Investment” page.
The first way is by selecting the “Automatic Investment” option under the “Quick Links” tab.
If for some reason you don’t see the “Automatic Investment” option under the “Quick Links” Tab, it can also be found under the “Banking” Tab:
3. Select “Add Automatic Transaction” under the Investment Tab
On this screen, you will have the option to either automate an investment or a withdrawal.
Because automating investments is the default screen, we can select the “Add Automatic Transaction” option from either the middle of the screen or on the right of the screen (both take us to the same place):
4. Select the account, frequency & amount to auto-invest
If you have multiple accounts with Vanguard, they will all show up on this screen.
In my case, I have three accounts with Vanguard.
Click the triangle/carrot on the left hand side of the account that you want to auto-invest into:
In this particular case, this is what it will look like when you click into a Roth IRA Account:
From here, you’ll have to fill out the following options:
- From this bank: What bank account is funding this auto-investment?
- Frequency: How frequently do we want the auto-investing to happen?
- Beginning on: When do we want the auto-investing to start?
- Until: When do we want the auto-investing to end?
- Total amount to invest $: How much do we want to auto invest?
- Allocate your investment either by dollar amount, by percentage or equally
Finally, the bottom option is selecting the investment that you want to automatically invest into.
The investment options that show up will depend on what investments that you are already have in the account that you’ve selected.
In my specific case, I can either select between the Vanguard Real Estate Index Admiral Fund or the Vanguard Federal Money Market Fund.
5. Review & confirm information
After selecting all your options, you will just need to confirm that the information is correct and then hit “Submit.”
How to Cancel Automatic Investments at Vanguard
If in the event that you ever need to cancel your Vanguard automatic investing, this is how you would do so.
1. Select “Profile and Account Settings”
After logging into your Vanguard account, you’ll be taken to the “Personal Investors” homepage.
From there, you’ll want to select the “Profile and Account Settings” option at the top right of the screen.
2. Select “Automatic Investment” under the Quick Links or Banking Tab
After being taken to the “Profile & Account Settings” page, there are two ways in order to get to the “Automatic Investment” page:
- Under the “Quick Links” Tab, Select “Automatic Investment” OR
- Click the “Banking” Tab and then Select “Automatic Investment”
3. Select “Delete” under the automatic investment that you want to delete
On the ‘Automatic Transactions’ Screen, you’ll see all the automatic investment transactions that are currently active.
Select the “Delete” Button:
4. Select “Yes” to confirm that you want to stop auto-investing
You will be taken to a screen confirming that you want to stop auto-investing.
Selecting “Yes” will cancel the auto-investing transaction. From there, you will then be taken to a confirmation screen saying that the auto-investing transaction has been successfully canceled.
Final Thoughts
Whether we are trying to strategically automate a Vanguard 3 fund portfolio or just trying to put some extra money away in general, Vanguard automatic investing is extremely straightforward to implement.
If you have a Fidelity account, check out our guide on how to set up Fidelity automatic investing.
Thank you for reading! 🙂
Full Disclosure: Nothing on this site should ever be considered advice, research or an invitation to buy or sell securities, please see my ‘’ page for a full disclaimer.
