About
Your money should have a job until the moment you spend it
Coinage is built on a simple belief: stocks — not cash — are the smartest primary currency available to ordinary people. Invest a little. Live a little better.
The problem with idle money
Average checking accounts pay 0.07% while inflation runs 2-4% annually. Every $10,000 sitting in cash loses approximately $233/year in real purchasing power — an invisible monthly fee of $19.42 that nobody sends you a bill for. Banks pay you nearly nothing while lending your deposits at 5-7%.
Meanwhile, economist Thomas Piketty showed that when the return on capital (r) exceeds the rate of economic growth (g), people who own assets compound their wealth while people who only earn wages fall behind. The return on capital has averaged 4-5% per year since antiquity. Economic growth averages 1.5-2%. The gap compounds relentlessly. The top 10% of Americans hold 93% of all stocks. The bottom 50% hold just 1%.
Global debt as of 2026 stands at over $315 trillion — nearly three times global GDP. No country is realistically paying this off. The plan is to inflate it away. Your checking account absorbs that cost. Diversified stock portfolios have historically risen with it.
How Coinage started
It started in college with a pair of sneakers. The founder wanted to buy them but didn’t know much about the stock market. He invested the money in Google stock instead — and when it went up, used the gains to fund the purchase.
Then came a concert. A group of friends had general admission passes but wanted a better experience that cost double. Everyone invested some money together. The market cooperated. They upgraded their tickets. After the concert, over dinner, they talked about how the investment made the experience possible.
That sparked a bigger question: what if you could pay for everyday things — coffee, dinner, groceries — with your stock market gains? What if the 20-30% of money sitting idle in your checking account could be working for you?
After testing it manually for months — investing idle cash into safe stocks and selling at profit to cover credit card bills — the approach reduced monthly expenses by around 12%. But manually checking brokers and deciding what to sell was tedious and emotional. That’s when Coinage was built to simplify the entire process.
The deepest motivation: giving people who are suffering a little bit better life. Not life-changing. Just better. The world is getting more and more optimized for the wealthy. Coinage is for everyone else.
What $20 a week actually becomes
At a moderate 8% annual return with a diversified dividend ETF portfolio:
| Timeline | Invested | Portfolio | Monthly Dividends | Covers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 year | $1,040 | $1,079 | $5.40 | Spotify |
| 5 years | $5,200 | $6,366 | $31.83 | Netflix + Spotify + coffees |
| 10 years | $10,400 | $15,857 | $79.28 | Phone bill |
| 20 years | $20,800 | $51,017 | $255 | Car payment |
| 30 years | $31,200 | $129,063 | $645 | Rent or groceries |
Same $20. Same job. Same paycheck. The only difference is where the $20 went. In a checking account for 20 years: $20,800. Invested: $51,017. The gap: $30,217.
The S&P 500 has never lost money over any 20-year period in its history. Warren Buffett has said the best investment most people can make is a simple low-cost index fund. He backed this with a $1 million bet — over 10 years, an S&P 500 index fund returned 126% while five hedge funds averaged 36%.
How Coinage works
Coinage connects to your existing brokerage account (Robinhood, Webull, Public, Moomoo, Tastytrade, and others) through SnapTrade, and to your credit cards through Plaid. It never holds your money or credentials. Coinage is not a robo-advisor or RIA — it does not give investment advice. You set the rules, and Coinage executes automatically when those rules are met.
- Connect your broker — Link your existing brokerage so Coinage can see your holdings.
- Create Nests — Build custom ETF-like portfolios with your chosen allocations. Set up recurring investments to dollar-cost average.
- Link your credit card — Coinage reads your transactions and statement balance through Plaid.
- Set selling rules — Choose which holdings to sell, set profit thresholds, and enable guardrails like profit-only mode.
- Spend normally — When your sell conditions are met, Coinage automatically sells based on your rules. If the market is up, you keep the gains. If it’s down, pay from your cash buffer.
What makes Coinage different
Selling Autopilot
This is the heart of Coinage. You set sell rules once — which assets, profit thresholds, guardrails like profit-only mode. Coinage monitors the market and automatically sells when your conditions are met. DALBAR 2024 data shows the average investor underperforms the S&P 500 by 8.48 percentage points from emotional decisions. A sell rule set in calm conditions eliminates that behavioral gap.
Nests — custom ETF-like portfolios
Build custom portfolios with precise percentage allocations. Invest on a recurring schedule. One-click rebalancing replaces the 20+ manual calculations and 8-12 individual trades required on Robinhood or Webull. Share with friends or publish publicly — followers copy with one tap. Trades execute based on each user's own rules, solving the regulatory problems that shut down social investing at other platforms.
Goal Nests
Create financial goals — a vacation, wedding fund, car purchase, or down payment. Set a target amount and deadline. Research shows named savings goals increase savings by 72%. Coinage tracks progress with a visual progress bar and, when you reach the goal, sells holdings so you can achieve it faster than traditional saving.
Spend tracking
Link credit cards and bank accounts to see where your money goes. Track spending by category, compare month-over-month trends, and see which purchases are being covered by your investment gains.
The thinking behind Coinage
Stocks as currency. The central thesis of Coinage is that stocks should be thought of as a currency — a smarter, harder form of money than fiat USD. Fiat currency is managed by governments that cycle every 4-5 years with no long-term accountability. Stocks represent real ownership of real businesses — CEOs answer to shareholders every 90 days. This structural accountability doesn’t exist anywhere in government.
Technology makes everything cheaper. Your phone, your TV, solar energy, even cars that drive themselves — technology drives costs down over time. As tech gets cheaper, more people adopt it. More adoption means more business. More business means higher margins and higher stock prices for the companies building that technology. Apple, Google, Tesla, Nvidia — look at how far they’ve come in 20 years. Coinage’s thesis: hold your money in stocks of companies that build technology, and in well-diversified ETFs that have delivered consistent returns over decades.
Think of your portfolio like a garden you actually eat from. Most people treat investing like a garden they never harvest — they plant things, watch them grow, stress about the weather. What Coinage proposes: live in the garden. Your portfolio is your grocery store. You harvest the dividends and gains while the roots keep growing.
The financial socialization gap. Research shows financial literacy accounts for 30-40% of retirement wealth inequality. The primary source isn’t school — it’s parents. Wealthy families pass down not just money but the entire ecosystem of wealth-building: investment habits, cultural attitudes toward risk, and the belief that wealth-building is normal and achievable. If you didn’t grow up in that world, Coinage is the financial socialization you never received.
Why small wins matter. Your first dividend — however small — is the moment your self-concept shifts from “worker” to “worker AND investor.” Research shows the single most powerful driver of positive motivation is making visible progress toward a meaningful goal. The first $0.47 in dividends is psychologically priceless. It doesn’t just confirm the math. It rewrites the story.
Security and trust
Coinage takes security seriously. All sensitive data is encrypted with AES-256-GCM. Bank connections go through Plaid — your credentials never touch Coinage servers. Brokerage access is through SnapTrade — broker logins stay with your broker. Session secrets use Argon2id hashing with HMAC-SHA256 signing.
Coinage follows GLBA-aligned safeguards with least-privilege access and regular vendor risk reviews. Every sell rule is yours to set, pause, or remove. You can disconnect any linked account at any time — no lock-in.
Coinage App LLC is not a registered investment adviser, broker-dealer, or financial planner. All investment decisions are made by you through your own self-directed brokerage account. Coinage does not hold, manage, or have custody of your funds or securities.
Invest a little. Live a little better.
The stock market is the most powerful wealth-creation machine in human history. Coinage makes it work for anyone willing to start — even at $20 a week. Free to start, with Premium when you’re ready.
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