Personal Capital Review from an average guy with a regular job, learning how to organize his finances. When you were growing up and counting the coins in your piggy bank, you probably never envisioned the option to track your finances all in one place in just a few minutes per day.
And while counting quarters and dollars is one thing, as we age, knowing our net worth and tracking our finances becomes more essential seemingly daily. Luckily, there is an assortment
of ways to do this.
One app and financial platform that stands out amongst the rest is Personal Capital.
Personal Capital is an app that offers essential financial tracking on things like daily finances, loans, bank account statements, monthly bills, retirement contributions, and investments.
Throughout the next couple of minutes, we will go over the features that Personal Capital offers, including the app, unique tools, and even some things I’ve learned through my personal
experience with the app.
Quick Review of Personal Capital
To give you a quick rundown:
Personal Capital is famous among many finance professionals and savvy people. Personal Capital is an excellent app for beginners and seasoned investors alike. No longer do you need
to use spreadsheets, write down expenses, keep receipts, or balance checkbooks after every transaction? If linked to your bank account, the app will automatically categorize each spending. Personal Capital is an app you can download on your phone and monitor your spending and
group transactions by category. No longer do you need to keep a spreadsheet on a computer or balance your checkbook since Personal Capital does all of that for you!
The app allows you to know where your money is going. It even allows you to set monthly budget goals and track your investment returns in retirement and taxable investment accounts.
Personal Capital is an investment app that links to your portfolio accounts and monitors your investment returns, such as your 401k, IRA, HSA, IPERS, SEP, and other retirement and
taxable accounts.
Quick Pros & Cons of Personal Capital
Most users find these positives when using Personal Capital:
● The app is an excellent resource for staying motivated and on top of finances.
● Monitor your budget and expenses
● The ability to track monthly cash flow
● Track Assets vs. Liabilities and Networth
● Informative Information analysis of asset allocation and fund fees
● Easy to use, the app is easy to navigate
● Free to use, the app is free to download and has excellent value.
● Customer Service responsive to phone calls and emails and have quickly fixed any
issues I’ve had.
Some users have described these Cons with Personal Capital:
● Linking your personal accounts to the app can take time
● Some are skeptical of linking accounts
● Accounts often need refreshing and reconnecting
● Fees for Wealth Management feature
For the Wealth Management feature that Personal Capital offers, this only applies to high net
worth individuals eligible for this feature. This could be a pro for some investors, but others may
prefer traditional low-cost index funds at brokerages such as Vanguard, Fidelity, Charles
Schwab, Blackrock, etc
Full Review of Personal Capital and Features:
Let’s first look at who Personal Capital is for
Who is Personal Capital For?
People on top of their finances or actively working towards financial goals. I came across the app after hearing about it from Financial bloggers as they recommend the app for being a resource in paying down debt, tracking spending, and watching investments grow.
Personal Capital Features 8 Great Features
GRADE 10/10 A
Personal Capital has cool features for tracking investments and educational information about
fees and allows you to see your portfolio comparisons and returns vs. S&P 500, an index
commonly used to track market returns.
Here are the Personal Capital features I enjoy:
Budgeting Tool:
The Personal Capital Budgeting Tool sees where your expenses are coming from, grouped by
category Budgeting tool is useful because it allows you to make changes in spending habits. Knowing where you’re money is going can help to make cuts on unnecessary purchases to
save more money.
Cash Flow Tracker:
Similarly, the app Cash Flow Tracker, is a tool to see how much money is coming in vs. being
spent. Cashflow is useful to monitor, because the more net cash you have to go in vs. gone out, the more you’re able to invest and take advantage of opportunities. Cashflow is vital to have
bills accounted for, emergency fund, and build-up assets
Investment Returns Tracker:
An interactive feature to show how your portfolio is performing vs. common indexes such as
S&P 500, Dow Jones, or International funds. Historically the S&P 500 has returned over 7% after adjusted for inflation. This is the most common benchmark to see if your investments are
keeping pace with the market. Networth Tracker/ monitor Assets vs. Liabilities. This feature is
fun to see your network go up based on paying down debts and investments growing.
The Networth Tracker:
This is the best feature with Personal Capital (in our opinion). The net worth tracker tool
manages and monitors all of your assets and liabilities in one spot. Debts are liabilities. If you
have more debt than investments, home equity, or other values, you’d have a negative net
worth. However as you pay off debt and begin investing its fun to watch networth increase in
accounts such as 401k, Roth IRA, accounts that will receive dividends, reinvestment and compound interest.
Portfolio Analysis:
On portfolio analysis this feature lets you check your investments with Informative information
about Asset Allocation, Cash, Bonds, US Stocks, International, Alternatives Large Cap, Mid Cap, Small Cap
Fund Fees Analyzer:
The Personal Capital Fund Fees analyzer tells you what fees you are paying for your
investments, including hidden or excessive fees. The analysis also tells you how much fees
could cost you over time based on the expected 8% returns. The app has features to see the
fees of investments. I am a fan of low fee index funds like Vanguard and can see my fund has a
small fee of 0.04, which is one of the most economical cost funds.
Many mutual funds have much larger prices, which can make a significant impact on potential investment gains over long periods. As the app, many mutual funds have high costs and are not
tax-efficient.
Check ROI Tracker & Portfolio Tracker:
Monitoring your ROI with the Personal Capital portfolio tracker feature that monitors returns vs.
indexes such as S&P 500 an index fund of 500 biggest companies in US Stock market, index
funds are a favorite of young people with time to invest, Bogleheads or F.I.R.E (Financially
Independence Retire Early) community with bloggers such as Mr. Money Mustache, Grant
Sabatier and JL Collins (The Simple Path to Wealth author), (JLCollins stock series articles
written for his daughter), and other finance gurus like Ramit Sethi are big fans of index funds for low fees, historical returns beating most fund managers.
The app comes with a retirement planner, a way to monitor if you’re on pace for your retirement
goals. All of these features are fun to track, especially as you make progress paying down debts, increasing investments, and seeing your net worth increase is a satisfying feeling. I love seeing transactions when my finances get dividends, that reinvest knowing that compound
interest will build-up
Asset Allocation:
The Personal Capital Asset Allocation is an advanced feature that lets users see what sectors their investments are in based on percentages.
This allows me to diversify and add stocks and ETFs in other industries if I choose to balance portfolios in underweight areas.I enjoy this feature as I have learned about investing through
app resources. (Though the closer to retirement you get you may get less aggressive and more conservative in asset allocation, you may have more bonds or other asset classes in case of market volatility
As you can see in the Screenshots above, using the Asset Allocation feature Personal Capital provides I am able to see how my investment allocation holds up against traditional allocations,
like the S&P 500.
Additionally, I also get to see my allocations of Cash, Bonds, US Stocks, International
Stocks,and alternatives.
How the Personal Capital App helped me in 3 areas:
Paying off debt, Saving, Investing.
● I was able to monitor paying off 10,000 student loans and monitor my other expenses
over a two year period.
● I am able to track my savings for accounts such as house Downpayment
● Check retirement Accounts such as 401k, Roth IRA and other accounts such HSA and a
nonretirement account with Robinhood
The case for Personal Capital
For me, the Fun part after taking on debt and establishing a budget is saving up money and
tracking investments and watching assets increase and liabilities decrease. It can be addicting
in a positive way to encourage proper financial management.
Another favorite feature of the app compares your investments vs. S&P 500 (500 biggest US-
traded stock companies) Goes into historical returns, fund fees, and asset allocation.
In my opinion, Personal Capital is the best app because you track everything. Budget, bank
account, investments, broken down into allocation and fees. Every transaction you make
monitored. Group into categories. Does smart weighing compare your investment portfolio vs.
the S&P 500. Fun because it tracks your net worth and tells you how all your investments are
doing. Perfect for finance geeks, everything but credit score. Monitors all your assets and
liabilities. So you instantly can see your finances improving on your phone for free.
The app also has an Wealth Management option for people with higher net worth.($1 million
plus inevitable assets) The fees for this service looks to be a little under 1%
Budgeting & Fintech Apps
Mint -Mint is another similar app to track paying down debt and setting goals. I also used mint
as a way to monitor my credit.
Tiller
Robinhood – One of the investments I track on Personal Capital is Robinhood. Robinhood is an
investment app popular with Millenials.
I wrote a review of my experiences with Robinhood in a previous article.
Final Thoughts
I used personal capital to achieve financial milestones, being Debt free after paying off the last
of my student loans and begin monitoring my investment returns. Apps like Personal Capital,
Mint, nerd wallet, learn vest, credit karma, and Credit Sesame, You Need a Budget (YNAB), etc.,
are suitable for monitoring where your money is going and your credit score. Personal Capital is easy
to track all your finances all in one place. Plus has some sound financial advice in regard to
index funds/mutual funds and fees.
Based on my experiences I recommend Personal Capital for anyone interested in improving
finances or staying motivated towards goals and financial milestones. The feeling of seeing the
hard work pay off, see potentially delayed gratification down the road is fun, and can be a
competitive fun way to improve finances and celebrate small wins, and significant steps accomplishments in financial goals.
