When you are able to visualize a problem, to have a holistic view of all of its issues and impacts, that is when a solution will emerge.
We all live hectic lives. The world around us constantly inundates us with information. When it comes to our financial health, keeping on top of everything is further complicated by information coming from many disparate sources.
Between banks, employer-sponsored retirement accounts, brokerage accounts, credit cards, and personal loans, it’s easy to understand why so many lose track of where their money is going and lose sight of, and hope for, ever achieving their financial goals.
A fundamental step is to see all your accounts in one central location.
A financial dashboard can help by pulling information spread across many financial institutions into a comprehensive and flexible visual overview. Let’s look at the free financial dashboards offered by Personal Capital and see if they can allow us to keep track of our financial lives in one centralized place.
Table of Contents
Is Personal Capital a Legit Company?
Founded in 2009, Personal Capital is a well-known and respected name throughout the industry. Over 3.3 million users have availed themselves of their free financial dashboards in order to take control of their finances.
Their wealth management team works with over 32 thousand clients overseeing over 22 billion dollars in assets.
With offices across the US, including California, Colorado, Texas, and Georgia, Personal Capital employs over 500 individuals.
The Better Business Bureau (BBB) accredited Personal Capital’s Wealth Management Services in 2019, and their team holds a current standing of an A+. They show a low customer rating of 1 out of 5, but a low number of reviews may mean this number is not fully indicative of the experience across their user-base. Several recent complaints attest to them pushing their paid services and data retention, which this review discusses below.
Users of Personal Capital’s free services have noted delays in the system crediting bonuses to their accounts. Issues appear to be resolved by the Personal Capital team to the reporter’s satisfaction, and the Personal Capital holds a B+ accreditation.
Personal Capital Mobile Review
Personal Capital offers a fully fleshed-out mobile app available in the Google Play and Apple App Store. Users across both ecosystems report a consistent experience and rate the app 4.7/5 stars. Some users have expressed annoyance with the implementation of additional security layers harming the user experience.
The application provides the same visualization and financial tools as the web interface optimized for the mobile experience.
Can Personal Capital Track Cryptocurrencies?
In recent years, investment into Cryptocurrencies has exploded, and Personal Capital has worked with several of the more prominent exchanges to pull their data into their service. Connecting your holdings at exchanges such as Blockfi is as easy as any other supported account.
Is Personal Capital Safe?
Storing all of your financial accounts in one location can be daunting, with the majority of banks and brokers stating in their EULA that the account holder is solely responsible for any transactions resulting from providing any third party or service their credentials. Is connecting your accounts to Personal Capital safe?
Both Personal Capital and your financial institution have a vested interest in keeping your information secure. Personal Capital adheres to current industry standards to keep your data safe:
- They encrypt your data with the Military standard AES-256 algorithm.
- Personal capital accounts use multilevel authentication
- Authenticator for web access and biometrics for mobile.
- They use the industry standard Plaid interface to connect securely to your financial services
- They leverage the third party Yadlee to store your account credentials.
- Account credentials are sent directly from Yadlee to your financial institution and never sent to the user’s browser.
- A small team, including several former Microsoft employees, founded Yadlee in 1999. Their headquarters is in California.
Does Personal Capital Sell Your Data?
Personal Capital does not sell your data. However, like any provider who uses third-party partners, they share a limited amount of your data. You can review Personal Capital’s current privacy policy, which includes details including:
- Personal Capital shares your contact information and a value range of your account with their marketing partners to market Personal Capital’s Wealth Mgmt Services. As mentioned above, you can opt-out of these communications through your information is likely to be retained.
- If you have cash or brokerage services through Personal Capital, they outsource the housing of those accounts to partners who specialize in those infrastructures. Their current partners are UMB bank for cash programs and Pershing for brokerage accounts.
- UMB Bank was founded in 1913 and is headquartered in the US.
- Pershing was founded in 1939 and is headquartered in NJ.
- Personal Capital additionally reserves the right to release your information in good faith for legal inquiries.
In my three years with Personal Capital, I have never been approached by another vendor based on any data released by Personal Capital.
Does Personal Capital Harass Their Users?
Personal Capital has a vested interest in transitioning its free users towards their paid services. This incentive will become particularly apparent as your net worth grows and hits certain thresholds. As a free user, Personal Capital will remind you of these paid services and are likely to receive an occasional phone call. To provide some perspective, you can request Personal Capital to add your number to a Do Not Call list, and I am yet to find their outreaches egregious enough to take this step.
Ads
The reminder of the presence of their paid services is always there. The login screen advertises these services, and a frequent pop-up will encourage you to consult with their financial advisors. While presented as a free consultation, it likely serves as an onboarding process to becoming a paid client. Personal Capital handles these notifications well, being consistent in their timing and not interrupting your session (or use of) the free tools. In a world where so many companies get this wrong, Personal Capital deserves credit for showing restraint.
Phone Calls
The Personal Capital team attempts to capitalize on its users’ financial milestones. Reaching one hundred thousand dollars in assets appears to trigger their staff to reach out. As soon as my account hit the one million dollar threshold, the calls became fairly incessant as I received roughly fifteen phone calls spread over two weeks. These phone calls often came during business hours when I was at work, and the calls all went to voicemail. Since this time, the calls have stopped.
Personal Capital allows you to add your number to their internal do not call list.
Emails
Outside of emails generated by support tickets I have initiated, I see about one email a quarter from Personal Capital.
Personal Capital allows you to opt-out of their marketing emails.
Reviewing Personal Capitals Free Tools:
Primary Financial Overview:
Account Overview
The left side of your main dashboard presents a summary of your total assets and liabilities. The service then groups each of your connected accounts into cash accounts, investment accounts, credit accounts, and other liability accounts. Each subsection has a cumulative total as well as the total of each account.
Drilldown
You can select each account in order to see a visual showing the running balance of that account. Below this visual, you will find a searchable listing of all transactions into or out of the account. Each transaction will be automatically categorized, allowing you to see where your money is coming from or what area of your life might be eating more than its fair share of your income. The system does a reasonable job of categorization, but you can edit every transaction and group as you see fit. You can export these transactions as a .csv to store or feed into applications such as Excel, Google Sheets, or Power BI.
Assets
This visualization pulls together all of your bank, brokerage, employer retirement, home equity, and cryptocurrency accounts.
Liabilities
The liability visualization pulls together all of your credit cards, loans, and other outstanding liabilities.
Bills
An overview of your outstanding bills. The due date of each bill will be stated if supported by your bank’s API, providing you with a quick reference for your upcoming expenses.
Budgeting
A radial visual showing all the money being expensed out of your accounts. You can set a monthly budget and see, in real-time, how your day-to-day expenses add up. The visual presents a point in time comparison to your expenses from the prior month to help you keep on track. Below the visual, the dashboard breaks your expenses down by category, making it easy for you to tell at a glance where your money is going.
*Fully secured lending causes some confusion here as each time your broker loans one of your holdings, it will show as an expense. You can adjust this, but it is always jarring to log in and see that my monthly expenses are suddenly over 100k.
Cashflow:
A total showing your income, expense, and net of activity across all accounts during the month. This dashboard frames each number against similar activity from the prior month as a reference. You can drill into each section to provide additional visualizations, category summaries, and the detailed transactions behind the visuals.
Reviewing Personal Capital’s Portfolio Tracking
Balance:
A running total of the cumulative balance of your investment holdings. The portfolio overview shows your overall performance over the past quarter and the current day. Next to this visual is a Market Movers section which shows your daily performance alongside several trusted benchmarks.
Holdings:
A multi-line graph showing your portfolio performance relative to one or more chosen benchmarks. You can select a holding within a portfolio to add its performance to the chart.
A data grid displays the breakdown of your holdings by ticker, number of shares held, current price, daily change, value gain by both percent and dollar value.
Allocation
A breakdown of your total holdings by asset class, including cash, bonds, stocks, and alternative investments. You can drill into each section to have it further broken down by market cap or sector focus. You can continue to drill down until you see the individual stocks making up each focus area.
US Sectors
A bar chart breaking down your asset allocation across industries.
A Review of Personal Capital’s Retirement Planner
Retirement Tracker
Personal Capital provides a fairly robust retirement planner. During setup, you will select any cash windfalls (annuities, inherence, pensions, downsizing your home). You will also enter any projected ongoing income, including rental income or part-time work in retirement. You will finally enter the annual budget you would like to support in retirement.
Personal Capital will then run a moderate sample Monte Carlo module to estimate how likely you are to be able to live the life you dream of in retirement.
Retirement Savings
Based on your target retirement age and projected spending in retirement, the retirement planner will present you with a recommended amount to save each year to keep on track. The dashboard effectively uses a simple gauge visual to show your progress towards your goal.
Emergency Fund
Personal Capital plots your total cash holdings against the standard recommended amount of 3-6 months of expenses. The system will use your monthly budget as a baseline, alerting you if your savings fall too low or if you have extra cash, you might better invest elsewhere.
Budgeting
Budgeting is one area where Personal Capitals current efforts may fall a little short. Transactions are automatically categorized and presented through a pie chart, but the ability to create a full budget plan it outside of the current scope of what their tools provide. A tool such as You Need a Budget or even Mint exceed what is on offer here.
Reviewing the Pros and Cons of Personal Capital
Pros:
Visualizations of all of your financials in one place
a holistic view of where your money comes from, where it goes, and how your financial health is changing over time. For many individuals, the presented visuals can allow them to understand the impact of their financial activities better than the underlying data.
Cons:
Providing your financial credentials to any third party can be distressing
Industry best practices are followed to keep your information secure.
Budgeting tools are limited
Options such as You Need a Budget offer much more robust tools to help you stick to a budget.
Are the above Personal Capital Tools Truly Free?
While Personal Capital offers paid financial management services, all the above tools are free. You will receive pop-up ads reminding you of their paid services upon login. I find these attempts to push their paid services to be appropriately passive and worth dealing with, considering the free tools they provide.
It’s easy to envision a world where Personal Capital places limitations on their free tools, perhaps limiting the filters to only allow you to view the last seven days or limiting how often you can refresh your accounts. They have resisted this temptation, and their free tools provide significant value. Perhaps some of this results from competition from services including Intuit’s Mint and You Need a Budget, but regardless of the reason, free users benefit.
Does Personal Capital Keep or Own Your Data?
Personal Capital will retain any communications between you and their employees. This includes any communications from their marketing and advisory teams, as well as any issues you may have submitted to their support teams. This practice is not unique to Personal Capital and exists to comply with legal regulations around financial document retention of five years.
Personal Capital’s privacy policy promises their clients that they “do not rent, sell or trade your Personal Information” and consumer data is hosted in the United States.