The one stop shop for keeping track of your investments and liabilities (debt). Personal Capital is an app that keeps track of your net worth, but it is sooo much more. Personal Capital links to your accounts in a secure way and gathers all of your expenses and accounts in one easy to use interface. The completely free service will also off you financial guidance and tips. Here are some highlights:
- track your transactions in one place whether you have five accounts and twenty transactions a day or one account and one transaction per day
- follow your cash flow with graphs of your income and expenses
- track your budgeting in a pie graph type interface
- track asset allocation
- plan for your retirement including a projection of your future investments
note: Mint (review below) is really the better app for tracking budgeting, but if you prefer to keep everything all in one place, Personal Capital is perfectly acceptable for budgeting
- Personal Capital has an awesome graph for your portfolio that tracks all of your investments. You get each breakdowns of each company you have holdings with and what type of investment you have with each company
- You can also track your current holdings and their performance on a daily, yearly or forever basis
- Personal Capital gives you a good idea of how you are allocated and whether or not you should diversify your portfolio . . . for example, I am heavy with U.S. companies and should probably diversify to international investments a bit
- Use their easy to follow investment checkup to compare data on things like historical performance of your investments and future predictions based on your allocation
- Personal Capital has an awesome retirement calculator that gives you an idea of where you are and where you should be in relation to you retirement goals
- Personal Capital is a Registered Investment Adviser (RIA) and is governed by those rules and regulations
- Upon opening an account and securely linking your accounts (this took me around ten minutes), the site gathers all of your information and projects the information in this easy to use interface
This dashboard displays the following information and updates this information daily:
- expenses
- income
- budget information
- total net worth
- asset allocation
- retirement savings and projections
- investment portfolio breakdown
Note: once again, other apps might have better or equally good retirement calculators, but Personal Capital allows you to use one app for everything
- If you need financial advice, Personal Capital provides this as well and even shows you their fees compared to your fees with your current advisor.
- Current fees are as follows:
- $0 – $1,000,000: 0.89% of account balance
- For clients that invest $1 Million or more:
- First $3 Million: 0.79% of account balance
- Next $2 Million: 0.69% of account balance
- Next $5 Million: 0.59% of account balance
- Over $10 Million: 0.49% of account balance
Security Concerns
- The security is top notch, with many protections in place to protect your financial accounts.
- Personal Capital requires you to register each electronic device that you use. They will send you an email or call your cell phone to register each device. After registering a device, there is another layer of security that is used when linking financial accounts to your Personal Capital account. You must sign in and verify the original online account in addition to your Personal Capital login. Data is fully encrypted
- Your bank and brokerage credentials are encrypted and stored at Yodlee (a financial technology veteran), not in Personal Capital’s database
- Personal Capital operates under SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) jurisdiction and is audited for compliance with SEC cybersecurity regulations
Recommendation:
Try it out for free. If you love it, add it to your rational toolbox. If you don’t like it, delete the app and move on to another option.
Stay Rational
-B&T