Personal Capital Review 2020: 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 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.

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.

How Personal Capital Makes Money

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.

Personal Capital was designed around the investor in mind, and their products and services are aligned to the group of people.

However, I have been very pleased with their marketing strategy - the reminders are there, but there is no hard sell.  I don't feel intimidated that I need to use an adviser or else, and that makes me like their product even more.