When I first started managing my own money, I did everything manually. Every month, I'd log into each of my accounts and record the balance in my Net Worth Record. It would take me a good hour to get every account and was such a pain, I started consolidating and closing accounts I didn't need!
For a very brief moment, many years ago, I tried Quicken and subsequently Mint. They were all OK — but they didn't play nicely with my brokerage accounts. Eventually, I abandoned them and went back to manually logging in.
Fast forward to today and I spend just 15 minutes each month managing my money. Just 15 minutes each month plus another five each week is enough to get everything right… and the cornerstone of that system is a tool called Personal Capital. It's free, it's well designed and what started as a test run in Fall 2015 has become my permanent solution.
I use Personal Capital as a way to quickly collect brokerage and banking data for my Net Worth Record, a spreadsheet I use to track our family's net worth. Personal Capital will pull the data from each account so I don't need to manually log in. It separates itself from other services because the investment management portion is not an afterthought and fully integrated into the system.
Many other tools started as a budgeting tool that added on investments. Personal Capital started as an investment tool that added in budgeting.
Table of Contents
About Personal Capital
Personal Capital was founded in mid-2009 with the mission of “better financial lives through technology and people.” They serve 1.3 million registered users (I am one of them!) with over $312 billion in tracked accounts – that's some serious cash.
They manage $3.9 billion in assets for clients with at least $25,000 to invest – which is itself an even more astounding feat (that's what pays for the service, fees on those managed assets).
The business has two components: a free personal finance aggregation tool and a paid advisory service. This review will look only at the aggregation tool side as I haven't used the paid advisory service.
Located in California, it was founded by Rob Foregger, Bill Harris, and Louis Gasparini. Bill Harris is the CEO of Personal Capital and was formerly CEO of Intuit, Paypal, and several other financial services and security companies.
They've been the beneficiary of quite a bit of capital investment. As of January 2017, they've raised over $200.3 million in funding (per Crunchbase). Their latest round was a second Series E round of $25 million from IGM Financial (to join a May 2016 investment of $50 million).
Here's CEO Bill Harris giving an overview of Personal Capital:
The Sign Up Process
Signing up was fast and they had every one of my accounts available for synching, including the Maryland 529 plans. Take that Quicken!
Check out this beautiful dashboard!
Transactions
The Transactions menu item is where you'll find the budgeting tools that Personal Capital recently added. If you've used Mint or other budgeting tools, it'll look familiar.
You have a list of transactions categorized into Income and Spending, followed by Bills.
Here's a shot of the All Income Cash Flow chart:
Cashflowwwww!
Like any tool there are a few hiccups to adjust, especially when it's transfers between accounts. Until you do that, you sometimes get wildly crazy numbers. 🙂
Portfolio Tracking
As I mentioned earlier, Personal Capital started on the investment side and only recently got into the budgeting side… so the portfolio tools are better. Here's what I see under Portfolio -> Holdings:
This snapshot was taken in the afternoon on January 12th, 2016 and the market has been crushed the last 30 days (most notably the first few days of 2016). Looks like I've been a little more fortunate, having lost only 3.21% vs. the -4.77% of the S&P500 and -5.4% of the Dow. The Balances and Performance tabs are less interesting than the Allocation tab:
You can click on those boxes and it zooms in and out on each. Nifty.
Personal Capital is going across all of my brokerage accounts, granted it's just at Vanguard and TradeKing, and giving me a full breakdown of my allocation. I can click on one of the boxes and it can give me an even granular breakdown:
If you click down one more level, it starts telling you the actual holding and the amounts you have.
The last fun chart we have is US Sectors:
Tracking Other Assets
You can track “other assets” like art, cars, etc – there just isn't any updating functionality because there's on central database of pricing for those types of things.
One exception is real estate, which you can track to Zillow's Zestimate:
Real estate can be tracked with Zillow's Zestimate
I'm not sure how I feel about Zillow's Zestimates as an accurate measure but I include my home price because I need something to offset my mortgage. The Zillow information for our house is wrong (it thinks it's a — beds, 1.5 bath house — it has more than 0 bedrooms and 1.5 baths) but I don't care enough to go through the process of updating it.
The other key thing is I don't want my perspective on our net worth affected by this unknown. I just assume it has held the value we assigned at purchase, it now offsets the mortgage, and I'm happy with that.
If you invest in real estate, for rental or otherwise, I can see the Zestimate being a little more valuable because you'll be interested in marking it's value to the market (even if it's a somewhat fictitious one).
Their Advisory Tools
The Advisory tools section offers the following:
- Investment Checkup: Given what you've shared in your enrollment, they would recommend an allocation. I'll expand on this below.
- Retirement Planner: This looks at whether or not your current pace of savings will be enough to support your retirement. It's a really fun tool I'll have to play with some more. (can you tell I'm a forecasting/stats nerd yet?))
- 401k Fee Analyzer: This takes a look at all the expense ratios in your various accounts and tell you if you're paying too much. The vast majority of our holdings are in Vanguard funds so there's not much to see here.
- Advisor: This is a page where you can schedule a call with a fee only financial advisor. The fee is an annual fee and based on assets under management.
- Invest Now: This is where you'd go if you wanted to enroll in their service.
- Research & Insights: The name for their blog.
So more on the Investment Checkup tab, this will take your investment profile and recommend a target allocation. Here's mine:
My target allocation recommendation
Not bad!
Here's where rebalancing comes into play. If things are out of whack, it's important to rebalance each year. This is a good reminder.
Also, once you hit $100,000 in investable assets, an advisor will start calling you. If you pick up and tell them you're not interested, they will obviously stop. If you don't answer, they will keep trying for a while and leave polite messages.
Personal Capital vs. Mint: Is Personal Capital better than Mint?
One of the biggest comparisons Personal Capital gets is with the juggernaut that is Mint.com.
Mint is a very popular budgeting and money management tool that is owned by Intuit, the owners of Quicken and TurboTax. In its day, as far as personal finance management went, Mint was the gold standard for aggregation. It's easy to use, incorporates all of your accounts, and can give you a big picture of your finances pretty quickly.
The budgeting tools are great for someone looking to track their expenses and get a better handle of where their money is going. I used it for years and watched it mature from a cool free tool that pulled your data to what it is today.
The big difference is that Mint is coming at the question of management from the income and expenses side. It's primarily a budgeting tool with a robust suite of tools to help you get on top of your spending and servicing of debt. It's less sophisticated in the investing department so its tools are limited in that regard.
So, is Personal Capital better than Mint? Personal Capital is better than Mint if you are focused more on investing than budgeting. If you're looking for a budgeting tool, Mint is better. (and if you're looking to change your budget, You Need a Budget is even better but it costs money)
Mint was designed to be a budgeting tool first, so it's investing tools aren't even close. Personal Capital is more about investing, with budgeting tools added later. The big knock against Mint is that there's very limited customer service… but it's free (heavily ad supported) so you can't expect 24/7 phone support.
If you're at the point where you're looking at your investments and need a portfolio management tool (AND a decent budgeting tool), Personal Capital would be a better fit. It's also free so there's no harm in giving it a try.
Is Personal Capital Safe?
As you'd expect, security is extremely important and should be with any software that even has a peek into your money. Personal Capital uses AES-256 bank-level encryption and has two-factor authentication.
Personal Capital will require you to register each device you use and will periodically request you to re-register them in a bid to keep you as secure as possible.
Internal controls are another strong suit – no employee has access to your information and it's your account information is encrypted and stored at Yodlee. Yodlee has powered a lot of other company's data for this purpose (they were the ones that supported Mint's data for a long time) and they have strong encryption as well.
No system is 100% safe but this one is pretty close.
What Needs Work?
In the first edition of this review, I had issues connecting with TradeKing because TradeKing had a different authentication system. My original solution was to put all of my holdings in a portfolio and Personal Capital tracked them separately.
Ally Bank acquired TradeKing, turning it into Ally Invest, and now everything tracks automatically without my workaround!
The budgeting tools need more work but it's relatively new so I expect growing pains. It'll get there and for now it still gives me the knowledge I need, monthly income and expense values, even if the categorization needs more hands on help.
Summary
Right now, Personal Capital is my tool of choice when it comes to managing money and investments. At this stage in my life, investments are becoming a more significant part of our finances and so having visibility into that area is crucial.
Have you been using Personal Capital? If so, I'd love to hear your experiences with it.
Personal Capital Review
FREE
Pros
- Easy to set up
- Rich investment analysis tools
- Intuitive design and user interface
Cons
- Didn't connect TradeKing
- Budgeting tool needs improvement
I recently started using personal capital. So far so good. I like you enjoy the benefit of having all my accounts rolled up into one place. Its a time saver.
That was the #1 benefit for me, the rollup since I couldn’t pull TradeKing data into Vanguard.
I’m not too thrilled with Personal Capital. I’ve been using it for around a year. There’s a problem of some kind every couple months. Sometimes, there are issues connecting to accounts. Sometimes, accounts are listed multiple times. I’ve had an issue where it was taking the balance of one account at a source and listing it as the balance of other accounts at the same source. As of right now, it’s been more than 3 months since I’ve been able to connect to the brokerage (one of the largest in the US) where the majority of my assets reside. It’s also been 3 months since I’ve been able to connect to my mortgage account. Support just keeps saying they’re continuing to work on it.
Right now TradeKing isn’t tracking directly, I had to replicate my portfolio and thus it won’t update itself. It’s been like that for a couple months, though I’m not sure what the hold up is.
I’ve been using Personal Capital as well but struggle with the authentication process. My bank has a number off hoops to jump through to sign in using an outside system so it can be cumber some. Because they are a growing company, customer service isn’t instant but doesn’t take two weeks either. I want to keep using it in hopes of gaining better picture of my retirement plan.
I have yet to contact customer service so I don’t know, but so far my banks have authenticated without issue. I realize I may be lucky though.
Unfortunately the problem you have with your TradeKing accoount is an inevitable side effect of sites like this and Mint. Any time a bank or brokerage website updates its API, Personal Capital has to update their code to properly interact with it. It seems like it would be a huge ongoing maintenance project on their part. I can’t say I envy the developers over there, haha.
Luckily for me, I just love monitoring my accounts by hand. I really enjoy checking in on all my accounts to see how well I’m doing, and what needs improvement. It makes me feel like I’m more in control. I might give Personal Capital a try, though, to see if I like it better. It seems like their recommendations could be really helpful.
I hope they get your TradeKing to track automatically soon!
I did enjoy a more hands on approach, especially when I review my accounts every month, but I found the logging in process understandably cumbersome. Plus, rolling up the data is a better way of viewing my accounts anyway.
Back in the day, everyone just used Yodlee to do the data collection. They had links to banks, or scraped pages after logging in, and so you had just one point of failure/maintenance. I don’t know if PC took that in-house but I doubt it. Give it shot and let me know what you think.
I’ve been using Personal Capital for a while now. For the most part, it work well and is very convenient, but, unfortunately, it doesn’t connect very well with smaller financial institutions like Robinhood.com or small mortgage providers.
I think the online capabilities of some of the smaller mortgage providers is probably lacking so there’s nothing to hook into. As for Robinhood, they don’t even have a web interface right? It’s 100% via the app?
I think all aggregators would have problems with those since there are no hooks?
Yes, you are correct on both counts.
Robinhood is only available via their app.
Also, Personal Capital allows their users to manually enter the dollar amounts of the smaller financial institution accounts into PC. If it’s one or two, it shouldn’t be too bad.
I have it monitor my TradeKing account by holdings, rather than direct link. So there are workarounds and for me it’s just one account.
I haven’t used Personal Capital but I have heard lots of good things about it, and by the looks of it, I think it has to potential to manage your personal finances pretty well, even if you don’t use your account for anything other than simply tracking your net worth.
Give it a shot and let me know how it goes!
How does this site differ from a site like draftapp? Trying to decide which one to use.
I haven’t used draftapp first-hand but as I understand it the tool compares your investments with other people in various peer groups with an eye towards lowering your expenses and establishing a solid asset allocation. Personal Capital is an aggregator of your finances, which includes accounts outside of your investments (like bank, credit cards, etc.). The primary focus is also investments but it has the other parts of your money system tied in. DRAFT is laser focused on investments, PC is broader and has a bit of the expense management portion built in too.
Like Sara, I’m also trying to decide, have you had any experience with Mint and if so, how does this compare to PC ?
I used Mint and it was good for budgeting and tracking expenses, it was (and from what I can tell, still is) bad with investing and portfolios. It was never designed to be for investments though, so you can’t fault it for that. I think Mint’s budgeting features are better than Personal Capital but Personal Capital’s investment tools are far superior.
If you think about the two and their history, Mint started as a budgeting tool to compete with Quicken. Personal Capital started as an investment tool to compete with robo-advisors. So their respective strengths are still in their original purpose/visions, they’ve just added what the other does and right now they don’t do the “other thing” better than their competitor.
This is a general call out to find out if anybody has used their financial advice service. I have a work 403b from a job I left and am looking to convert it to a traditional IRA (and then maybe concert to a Roth IRA if I can get my head wrapped around how that works). My options are to get a vanguard account (no current account now) put it in betterment where I have some money, or now that I signed up for this personal capital account, wonder if I should use them. Just curious if anyone has any thoughts/input or experience with their financial advise.
Also in terms of just aggregating my accounts, I find that for my Mass Mutual account (that’s the 403b I’m looking to move) it doesn’t split up the money between traditional and Roth (I have both) and I’m now in the TSP and same thing – lumps it all in as one sum and doesn’t differentiate between Roth and traditional so I have to go in to those accounts anyway. Is that something where I can change a setting to fix or is that just unfortunately how it works.
Thanks!
SJ
Personal Capital looks lika a great tool to track your accounts, maybe I will test it for my gold investments.
I tried Personal Capital and loved it until I realized someone else might have access to all my financial info. It’s not clear how much is shared with these investors in the shadows. Am I the only one concerned about this?
This is something all of these companies have to deal with and they have more to gain from keeping your personal information private. Security is always a concern when you put all this information out there, that’s for sure, and it’s a completely valid one. I’m comfortable with it though.
This looked exciting to me since Quicken helped me get control of my finances years ago. But one thing that concerned me was how they actually linked the accounts.
For some links, they want you to provide the actual username and password for accessing the account. I wasn’t very comfortable with that. But I did find that you could do manual investments where you just tell it your stock holdings and it will pull stock prices and update your net worth. It might mean extra work for me whenever I buy/sell something, but it gives me a little bit more peace of mind.
If you’re uncomfortable logging in (which is how all the tools do it), manual investments is the best alternative and they can update it based on that.
I like the functionality of personal Capital. However, it has a lot of trouble authenticating my accounts. And though I have left several support tickets I have not gotten so much as an acknowledgement of my question much less a solution. Very unhappy with customer service.
Hi! Thanks for this review! I’ve been trying to figure out how to get my TradeKing, now Ally to connect. You mentioned that it connects now through Ally Invest. I searched for that in Personal Capital and cannot find it. Could you tell me exactly which of the Ally options you used? Ally Bank didn’t work, that’s for cash accounts. Ally Financial Services appears to be for loan accounts…etc. Your article is the first I’ve read that mentioned that there IS a working solution for former TradeKing accounts, so I’m excited to see how to get it to work. Thanks!!
Hi Trisha! At the time I wrote it, I was wrong. It didn’t link in my Ally Invest. I saw this comment and went back in to check and it appears that Personal Capital automatically pulled it in. I have a new Ally Bank listing under the Investment category.