Personal Capital is a money management tool focused more on investment and retirement. Both the web tool and the mobile app(for Android and iOS) are amazingly designed to help you enter, modify and view information regarding your finances. Like other money management tools, Personal Capital lets you manage all your accounts in one place. It also provides real-time data, which in turn, helps you visualize your cash flow.
About Personal Capital
Personal Capital(previously known as SafeCorp Financial Corp) is an online financial advisor and wealth management company based in Redwood City, California. It was founded in the year 2009 by Bill Harris, Rob Foregger, Louie Gasparini and Paul Bergholm. Currently, the company is led by its CEO, Jay Shah.
This free tool allows them to assist clients from all over the world. The tool is designed to help people manage their multiple investments. They also have paid plans like Investment Service, Private Client, and Wealth Management. Their experts help clients one on one.
Features of Personal Capital
1. Set your future goals with the Retirement Planner
Once you link your bank account with Personal Capital, it will analyze your spending and create a report of your financial activity— from the context of retirement. You can create several reports with the tool–under the tab called Income Events. Personal Capital also lets you know the amount you have saved this year and also your yearly savings since you created this account.
2. Well organized investment portfolio
As I already mentioned, this tool is focused mainly on investment and retirement savings. The investment tab has subtabs including your holdings, balances, performance, allocation and US Sectors. With the help of being an interactive chart, you can see how each of your investment accounts is performing. Moreover, the Allocations subtab displays a snapshot of your investment portfolio.
3. Retirement fee analyzer
Are you concerned about a sudden rise in the amount you are currently contributing to retirement plans like the 401k or Roth IRA? The Retirement fee analyzer is another tool that predicts your fee and earnings. It displays the whole thing with an interactive chart that shows the increase or decrease in fee and earnings until you hit the retirement age. You can also view a report of your investment fund account and their details.
What I like about Personal Capital
I like how beginner-friendly the Personal Capital money management tool is. I don’t need to have a background in finance to be able to use and benefit from this tool. All I had to do is link my bank account, credit card, personal loan payment, and mortgage account to the tool and it took care of everything else. Plus, both the desktop version and mobile app appear clean and tidy.
What I don’t like about Personal Capital
As I already mentioned in one of the previous sections, Personal Capital had created this tool intending to generate leads for their paid services. So, naturally, the app does appear a bit salesy, at times. Some of the data is purposefully highlighted; to show how Personal Capitals services are cheaper than that of my current agent.
My recommendation
I recommend Personal Capital to anyone looking for a free money management tool. This tool is more suited to a newbie investor. Notably, someone unfamiliar with the finance jargon or never worked or studied finance before.
Pricing
This tool is 100 percent free to use. There are no in-app purchases or annoying ads popping up. Personal Capital never upsells their paid services directly(via calls or text messages), but expect emails regarding their paid services.
