Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and his business partner Dany Garcia are making a investment in digital personal-finance service Acorns -- which will give each new user a $7 credit, a symbolic reference to when he was a struggling athlete and the amount of money he had left in his pocket.
Acorns is a micro-investing platform with services including one that lets users automatically invest spare change by rounding up their purchases to the nearest dollar and investing the difference in a diversified portfolio of exchange-traded funds. The company has almost $3 billion under management and 8 million people in the U.S. have opened accounts.
Years before Johnson became one of the biggest movie stars in the world, he was cut from the Canadian Football League in 1995 and left with just $7. When he and Garcia co-founded their production company later they named it Seven Bucks.
“Especially this year, there are numerous people feeling as I did when I was jobless with just $7 in my pocket; anxious and uncertain about my life and future,” Johnson said in a news release. “Those seven bucks represented a defining moment that changed my life.”
Effortless Savings
Acorns launched in June and is aimed at parents who want to save for their kids’ future. Garcia declined to describe the size or structure of the investment her and Johnson made in Acorns.
“Savings and finances have always been inaccessible and hard to understand,” Garcia said in an interview. “What Acorns is doing is making it effortless.”
Johnson will appear in advertising for the company, Garcia said.
Acorns chief executive Noah Kerner in an interview said that anyone who invested $7 a week starting when they were born would have over $800,000 by the time they retire, assuming an 8% annual rate of return.
“This is your starting point, if you commit to this and do $7 each week it can really amount to something in the future,” he said in an interview.
This story was provided by Bloomberg News.