I’ve recently signed up for Personal Capital and have already been using the service extensively. Personal Capital is a financial account aggregator that offers free financial tools to help you manage all of your finances in one place. I’m sure many of you may have heard of it or may already be using it. Think of Personal Capital like Mint.com, but more heavily geared towards tracking your investments and net worth.
I've been using Mint.com since 2007 and I love the simplicity
of automatically tracking your expenses, income, investment returns, home value,
etc. Keeping track of my credit card charges through Mint has helped me
catch a few small fraudulent charges over the years. Mint is free and I regularly recommend
the service to anyone interested in keeping an eye on all his or her financial
accounts in one place.
I've also recommended using ClearCheckbook as
a manual way to balance your banking, credit card, and investment
balances. Some people find manually keeping track of finances to be a
pain, but I feel like it helps me keep an idea of what is going on with our
expenses. After all, if you don't know how much money you need to live
off of, how will you know how much money you need in the future for retirement? I use this service daily to
track my expenses and financial account balances. ClearCheckbook is free.
Anyways, let’s get back to Personal
Capital. I've put off
signing up for the service for a while, because I didn't want to mess around
with yet another financial tracking app. Mint and
ClearCheckbook already do such a good job of tracking all of my bank accounts,
investment accounts, home value, and rental property value. Mint also does a great job helping us
create and stick to a budget. Where Personal
Capital really shines is analyzing and managing your investments. When compared to Mint or
ClearCheckbook, Personal Capital offers superior tools for managing your
investment portfolio.
Personal Capital’s features really
impress me. When you login, the dashboard provides you with your complete
financial snapshot. You can see information about your cash flow, budget,
investable cash, investments, credit card debt, mortgage(s), and property
values.
I totally get why over 1.4 million
people use Personal Capital to track over $350 billion. I can see
why so many financial bloggers highly recommend the service. Personal
Capital offers a ton of information regarding your investment portfolio,
asset allocation, investment fees, tax optimization and projected retirement. Signing
up for Personal Capital and using the tools and resources offered is completely
free.
When I was tracking our investments
with Mint, I could only see the account balances in our different investment
accounts. Every time I
wanted to check on our exact asset allocation, I would have to manually pull
all the information out and calculate everything by hand – that gets tedious
and annoying. Once I signed up for Personal Capital and linked all of our
investment accounts, I could instantly see our exact asset allocation.
Seeing this information helps us better keep track of and rebalance our
asset allocation. This chart tells me that it’s time for us to load
up on more bonds and international stocks. Our investments are
mostly in the Boglehead 3-fund portfolio. This portfolio
includes a piece of over 3,600 US stocks (Apple, JP Morgan Chase, Google,
Chevron), over 5,500 international stocks (Nestle, Toyota, HSBC), and over
6,300 individual US bonds.
Homeowners and landlords can plug in their home address and Personal
Capital will automatically use Zillow to add your property value into your net
worth. Personal Capital can also track your student loans, mortgage,
credit cards, checking and savings accounts. I recommend married
couples share the same login and information since you can get a big picture
idea of how much the both of you are worth together, and see what's going on
with your combined your incomes, credit card spending, and investment
portfolios.
The Personal Capital retirement planner is very easy to use. You
input your investments, savings, risk tolerance, desired monthly expenses in retirement
and your desired retirement age. The retirement planner allows you
to add large upcoming expenses such as a home purchase, or college
tuition. You can also add income events such as projected Social
Security distributions, rental income, pensions or inheritances. The
retirement planner then calculates your likelihood of successfully retiring
when you want to. It’s nice to step back and get a big picture look
at your odds of successfully retiring when you want.
We still have a lot to work on with our retirement. I'm still playing around with the retirement calculator - it's actually a lot of fun. |
The retirement planner allows you to
adjust your savings rate and annual expenses, providing instant feedback on how
those changes affect your retirement and allowing you to check if you are on
the right track for your retirement. No
matter your financial situation, the retirement planner can help build a
detailed plan for your retirement.
Personal Capital displays beautiful
graphs and charts to help you visualize your investments and asset allocation. The software and interface are easy to
use. The iPhone app
is great as well.
Once you hit 100K of investable
assets, a licensed financial advisor from Personal Capital will call and see if
they can schedule a free telephone consultation. During this phone call, the financial
advisor will take the time to discuss your financial goals and questions. The financial advisor will discuss
ways to improve your portfolio, reduce your fees, and optimize your taxes. There is no obligation to speak with
them but it may be nice to get some input on your personal financial situation. This phone call is free of charge.
In addition to the free investment
and retirement tools, Personal Capital does offer professional investment
management. Their financial
advisors can manage your assets by helping you stick to your asset allocation,
cut investment fees, do tax loss harvesting, provide customized retirement
planning and much more. Here are the fees:
There are 3 levels of account
management: Investment Service (up to 200K in investable assets), Wealth
Management (200K to 1M in investable assets) and Private Client (over 1M in
investable assets).
These levels of management offer
features such as 24/7 call access, 401K advice, college savings, estate planning,
private equity review, hedge fund review and more.
While Mint.com and
ClearCheckbook.com are great for tracking your finances and sticking to your
budgets, Personal Capital excels at tracking your investments. This is especially helpful when your investment
account balances start growing into significant values. There is definitely a place in your
financial toolbox for Personal Capital. I highly recommend
checking out Personal Capital and playing with the investment analyzer and
retirement planner. You
can sign up for your free account here.
I am an affiliate for Personal
Capital. If you sign up
from a link on this page, I may receive compensation.
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