Figuring out how to invest your money as an expat living in the UAE can be tricky. Here’s how Sarwa can help.
A look at the best investment in the UAE for expats
When choosing where to invest your money, it makes sense to shop around and appraise the merits of each advisor and online platform for UAE expats. This will depend on your own unique circumstances – your current financial position, your objectives, and your time horizons for achieving them.
Features such as low cost diversification, automated rebalancing and the ability to speak to a human advisor when you need to can make a huge difference to the performance of your investment portfolio over the long term. And of course, it pays to invest via a platform that’s committed to keeping costs in check, since the high fees charged by many advisors can quickly erode your wealth.
What is Sarwa?
Truth be told, the investment landscape can seem complicated, bewildering, even overwhelming. This situation is exacerbated for expats in the UAE, whose finances straddle different countries and financial regimes. But it doesn’t need to be that way. Here at Sarwa we’ve made it easy for UAE expats to invest and grow their money with the power of our online investing platform.
Sarwa is an online financial advisor that makes it a piece of cake for expats to open an account and start investing. We ask you a few simple questions in order to assess your risk appetite. We then build a personalized portfolio for you, consisting of low-cost passive investment products.
It takes less than 10 minutes to get started. We use a technique called “automated rebalancing” to ensure your money is working as hard as possible for you over the long term. For those who wish to speak to a human, all our customers have the opportunity to speak to an advisor. Our door is always open.
What exactly are ETFs and why does Sarwa use them?
The products we use to invest your money are called exchange-traded funds (ETFs for short). These are low cost funds that enable us to generate maximum returns with minimum costs. We truly believe they are the best investments for busy UAE expats who don’t have time to spend all day studying investment portfolios.
ETFs give us tonnes of flexibility in how we take care of your money. This enables us to dynamically adapt to market conditions without incurring excessive costs that could eat into your returns. We do this by using ETFs with low management expense ratios.
We’ve worked with world-renowned financial experts – including David Gibson-Moore, who chaired the board of JP Morgan in Switzerland, and Dr. Jiro Kondo, who hails from Goldman Sachs and has a PhD at MIT – to build portfolios of ETFs that are globally diversified. This helps to reduce your risk and optimise your returns.
How much does Sarwa cost?
There is only one simple advisory fee that we charge our customers. The excessive fees charged by traditional financial advisors eat into investors’ returns. This makes it very hard to build meaningful wealth over the long run.
That’s why we’re pioneering a new approach to investing, one that’s affordable, convenient and transparent. Gone are the endless fees charged by traditional wealth managers. We charge our customers one simple advisory fee of 0.85% on the balance of your account, billed monthly. This fee goes down to as low as 0.5% for larger accounts. Customers also pay a fund fee of about 0.1%, which is built into the funds held in your portfolio and hence needs to be passed on. Although this isn’t a fee charged by Sarwa, we still like to disclose it to give you a comprehensive view of what you’re paying.
The right choice for UAE expats
Sarwa takes the headache out of investing for people living and working in the UAE. We are based in the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) and when you travel abroad your account remains in the custody of our brokerage partner, Interactive Brokers.
Since you are global, we know you need an investment platform that’s global, too. Our platform makes it simple to monitor your investments from other countries or even transfer your account to another provider further down the line.
If you’re interested in finding out more, or simply after some advice on how to make your money work harder for you, please get in touch.
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