Personal Capital Review: Track Your Investments And More

Personal Capital has been a leading money management tool for the last few years. They offer great spending and investment tracking, all for free. They also recently launched an online savings account with a compelling yield.

My personal love affair with Mint is now over.  It's still a great free money management tool, but I've always had a negative view about how Mint handled investments.  It just didn't do enough for my investments to really help me in my personal finances.  And since investing is such a big part of my finances, I always relied on Quicken instead.

But in my continued quest to move my finances to the cloud and looking for Quicken alternatives, I've found a free tool that really nails everything Mint does, PLUS investments.  It's called Personal Capital. 

See why we like Personal Capital in our Personal Capital review. Plus, learn about their upsells and their new compelling cash account as well. And see how they compare to the other top money and financial tracker apps out there.

What Is Personal Capital?

Personal Capital is both a budgeting app and financial tracking tool, as well as an investment manager. They are most well known for their financial dashboard - where you can track your spending, budget, monitor your investment portfolio, and more. The best part is that this tool is currently free.

They are also a professional investment manager, where you can meet with a financial planner and allow them to manage your portfolio for a fee. They effectively use their free dashboard as a lead generator for their investment management services.

Personal Capital was founded in 2010, and was acquired by Empower Retirement in July 2020.

We recently named Personal Capital a Best Budgeting App for 2022 based on the robust free features it offers.

What Personal Capital Has

The reason I loved Mint for so long is because it automatically updates and categorizes your transactions for you.  You always get an up-to-date picture of your spending, and you can see where your money is going.

Personal Capital covers all the bases.  When you log-in, you're greeted with a dashboard that is very similar to Mint.  On the left side, you can see all your accounts listed, as well as your total net worth at the top.  Personal Capital connects with all the same banks and institutions as Mint, and also lets you add asset accounts, like your house.  Then, you get to see a dashboard that includes the following:

A basis of your spending:

An overview of your total portfolio:

A look at how your individual stocks did:

When you get into the basic cash flow area, called "Banking", you can look at "My Cash", "My Bills", or "Savings".

My Cash is just like Mint in that you can see a breakdown of where you're spending your money.  You can also switch tabs and see where you are earning your income from as well.

The "Savings" tab is the equivalent to Mint, in where Personal Capital will show you better options for earning money on your savings account.  Right now, it recommends the Everbank savings account as having the best interest rate on a savings account.

Related: The Best Portfolio Analysis Tools

Investing Tools

The best part of Personal Capital are the investing tools, which are simple, yet much more powerful than what Mint was offering.  Personal Capital does investment management right, but focusing on a few basic things:

• The Value of Your Portfolio
• The Performance of Your Portfolio (as a whole and of each individual investment)
• An Overview of Your Holdings
• An Analysis of Your Allocation
• Good Transaction Management

What always frustrated me about Mint (and sometimes Quicken) was the transaction management.  So far, I've found Personal Capital to be excellent at correctly managing all imported transactions from my brokerages.  For one asset, they didn't get the symbol (due to the fact it is in a transfer company, not a brokerage), but I was manually able to input the symbol.

Investing Advice

To me, it is always important to know how a company offering a free service makes money.  And Personal Capital makes money by promoting their financial advisers to help you with your portfolio. Their goal is to eventually get you as an asset management client - and once you cross $100,000 in assets, you can expect their advisors to begin calling you and encouraging you to meet with them to review your portfolio.

If you decide to work with them, they do charge (quite a bit) to manage your portfolio. While their fees are all inclusive, you can expect to start paying 0.89% AUM (assets-under-management) if you have less than $1,000,000 invested with them.

They actually call you different levels based on how much you have invested:

• $100,000 to $200,000: Investment Services Client
• $200,000 to $999,999: Wealth Management Client
• Over $1,000,000: Private Client

As you have more funds invested, your AUM goes down. Once you hit "Private Client" status, you'll start saving a little in AUM fees. However, it is tiered:

How Does Personal Capital Wealth Management Compare?

Honestly, Personal Capital's Wealth Management services are more expensive than other companies. While they have a great free dashboard, they investment services are expensive than other companies. They're not a robo-advisor, but they're also more expensive than other firms who do direct human-assisted investing.

Here's how they compare to some of their main competitors.

Personal Capital Cash

Personal Capital recently announced Personal Capital Cash. This is a cash management account, and it acts like a high yield savings account. 

The Personal Capital Cash account yields 0.05% APY - which is a very compelling offer. The account is also FDIC insured, and since it's a cash management account, there are no transaction limits on deposits or withdrawals. 

If you're a Personal Capital Advisory client, you actually can earn a higher rate - 0.10% APY. 

Check Out Personal Capital

Don't just take my word for it - see for yourself.  Just like Mint, Personal Capital is free.  It only takes a matter of minutes to input your bank logins and get your data live.  Personal Capital even advertises it will take just 29 seconds if you have one account to add.

Spend 29 seconds right now and check out Personal Capital, and then leave your thoughts below!  I'd love to hear what you think about this product.