RateItAll: The Opinion Network

I am new to investing, and I found the site easy to navigate - easy to understand, and have had no problems what so ever. Of couse I have only been on their site for 6 months, and have only started investing. A couple of $100 a month, but I am happy with my choice to go with them. They are affilated with ING and we have moved our savings and checking there as well and it has been a great experience. They have always responded to my emails with 24 hours and have answered all my questions no matter how simple. I have never had to call so I can't offer any advice there.

I like the idea that there are no minimums. It's a good place to invest when you can find more than $100 to invest at a time (for me, that's two or three times per year). I invested my tax return in an IRA last year and have been pleased.

Horrible. I have no control over my finances with this service. Recently, I had accidentally place buy order instead of sell orders on all of my shares. I couldn't get a human being on the phone fast enough to cancel those orders (I had to listen to a lot of advertizing as I made my way through the phone menu). By the time I did reach someone, the orders had already gone through and customer service told me all I could do was repay the fees and sell again. If that were the only issue I had it would not have been such a big deal, but it ended up turning into a financial nightmare. It had taken sharebuilder all but 3 minutes to take that money out of my checking account. Literally. That money was supposed to cover checks I had already dropped in the mail to cover other bills. Sharebuilder never did deposit that money back into my checking account when they said they would. They essentially held my finances hostage by deciding to process requests whenever they simply felt like it. Needless to say, within a few days I was swimming in overdraft and bounced checks fees from the bank. My credit was hit with late payment reports. The money I lost with these complications ended up putting me behind scrambling to pay other upcomming bills as well. The problems just wouldn't end. By the time all was said and done, I lost several hundred dollars. Then I had to pay extra fees to close my account with this absolutely horrible service. Stay away.

I have held accounts for 2 years. Have been pretty happy so far. I ran into some problems with accounts & customer service was relatively easy to reach and was reasonable in resolving the issues. They did not completely go out of way to resolve the issues - but issues got resolved in timely fashion (that's why I give 4* instead of 5*)