Personal Capital Income Accuracy & Mortgage Advice

StuckinCT

Recycles dryer sheets
Joined
Oct 14, 2015
Messages
206
Location
Fairfield
I have had access to eMoney for a while and always suspected that the portfolio income estimate was too high so tonight I created a Personal Capital account and imported my Schwab accounts.

Personal Capital has my income slightly higher for a portfolio yield of 3.8%. My portfolio has a lot of individual stocks, Dow stocks in particular, ETFs, and bond mutual funds with an 80% stock 20% bond allocation.

I have a small amount of closed end funds with high distributions, less than 2% of the portfolio and 1.5% in MLPS- unfortunately. In other words, I am not juicing the distributions with BDCs etc. Not much in preferred stocks either- this is pretty plain vanilla.

I think 3.8% seems like a pretty high yield even with this pull back, but I suppose all of the dividend increases over this bull market make it possible.

If this is the case, though my portfolio is down $1.2mm from $8mm I am still feeling like I have enough retirement cash-flow to retire @ 49 this summer, i.e. I don't need to sell anything to cover my income requirement of $240k, $260k pretax. This is almost all non-qualified money.

It's funny because after refinancing my $500k mortgage in this down turn, I cut my mortgage expense by $6k per year so now my budget matches my income for the first time now that the market is down 20%! Crazy!

The only potential hitches are my mortgage- I only include my interest and not the principal portion in my expense estimate and now that my rate is 2.5%, if the loan closes, I get a 1.3% spread in income between the 3.8% yield and that will gradually disappear if the market goes down over the next 15 years repaying principal or if I see a lot of dividend cuts.

I am actually more worried about the dividend cuts than a market decline in many ways. I think that this Coronavirus scare will blow over and eventually the oil market will come back into balance after some pain so I actually think with the economic stimulus of lower energy prices, mortgage rates and fiscal stimulus, this downturn could end up extending the cycle or paving the way for a recovery after a brief recession.

Am I being too optimistic? Does personal Capital overestimate income? Finally, I am holding an extra $250k in cash right now and I have estimated income on that investing now, should I repay half that 2.5% mortgage and reduce income by $9.5k!:confused:?
 
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Is that 3.8% payout estimate coming from their Retirement Planner page or somewhere else? I have a free PC account but also don’t know where one inputs mortgage info.
 
Is that 3.8% payout estimate coming from their Retirement Planner page or somewhere else? I have a free PC account but also don’t know where one inputs mortgage info.

I am clicking on investments on the left hand side when login and then once I am in the account I click on "income" on the top right between balances and holdings.

I am assuming this is just adding up all of the dividend and interest payments over the last year as opposed a retirement income projection capability like firecalc.

I like to look at it both ways income/firecalc, and my income yield was at 3.3% at the peak so it would make sense that it is now at 3.8%. I know Justin of Root of Good uses Personal Capital and looks at the monthly income.

I also think if I projected 3.8% WR at the market peak in firecalc it would have been too optimistic, but now that the market is down 20%, 3.8% might be sustainable. This is the old fashioned way of looking at it, just clip the coupon and don't touch principal and let the appreciation be an inflation hedge.

Also worth noting, with interest rates so low, stocks look super attractive in terms of yield. Just the plain old Dow yields 2.5%, real estate 3.6% International 3.5%. Still need to figure out how I am at 3.8% yield- my sector weightings are also pretty close to market weights too, i.e. not way overweight utilities, energy or communications. I do own 2% EM bonds too which yield 10%.

I'm afraid I am going to have to create a spreadsheet and check all the individual yields. I have a call with PC tomorrow- wondering if cap gain distributions are increasing it but I don't get a lot of cap gain distributions as mostly stocks ETFs:facepalm:
 
I am clicking on investments on the left hand side when login and then once I am in the account I click on "income" on the top right between balances and holdings.

I'd be interested in this feature from Personal Capital too, but I do not see an option for "income" between balances and holdings.

What I see is...
 

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  • PC-Screen.pdf
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I'd be interested in this feature from Personal Capital too, but I do not see an option for "income" between balances and holdings.

Go to "Overview" and click on "Investments." Select and click on an Account under Investments. You should see "Balance" "Income" "Holding" in the upper right.
 
I must be on something different. Are you using PC's app or a web browser? I'm using chrome and I don't get the same thing as you are describing.

Here is another screen shot...
 

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  • PC-Screen-1.pdf
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I must be on something different. Are you using PC's app or a web browser? I'm using chrome and I don't get the same thing as you are describing.

No. You are on the right track. You just need to go one step further. Where you are is where you highlight "Investment" in the left column. You need to (if you haven't already) click on the down arrow (to the left of "Investment") to open up the "Investment" list. Then, if you highlight a specific account, it will show you what you are looking for.

PC-1.JPG

PC-2.JPG
 
Thanks for trying to help me with PC. I still am not seeing what you are. I have a screen shot of what I think you told me to do but it still doesn't give me the layout your getting.

I've enclosed another screen shot when i click on one of my investments on the left.
 

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  • PC-Screen Shot.pdf
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Thanks for trying to help me with PC. I still am not seeing what you are. I have a screen shot of what I think you told me to do but it still doesn't give me the layout your getting.

I've enclosed another screen shot when i click on one of my investments on the left.

Hmmm. You are correct. You are missing that whole line above "Rollover Ira Brokerage Account - Ending..."

The only difference I can see is that I have each account with a unique name. You have multiple accounts with the name -- four as "Bob-Vanguard" and two with the name "Cheryl-Fido." Why don't you rename them to, say, ***-1. ***-2, etc. or ***-#1 and see if that changes things.
 
Well thanks again. I'm going to give up though. I did hit the edit for one of the Bob ones and added "-1" to it and it renamed all of them with "-1"!

I did highlight one entry where my 401k is and those options did come up, but for that account it wasn't of much use.

So thanks again!

Bob
 
I'm going to give up though. I did hit the edit for one of the Bob ones and added "-1" to it and it renamed all of them with "-1"!

Yeah, ain't technology great. I know exactly how you feel.

New iRock.JPG
 
I went through some of my mutual fund year end “dividends” which are often paid in two installments. In the case of an EM bond fund in December, the regular monthly dividend was paid and then there was a year end dividend. Personal Capital counts these year end dividends along with monthly dividend as income whereas eMoney does not, so that’s why my income is about 8% higher with personal capital. I think the fund companies are able to pay out some of the cap gain distributions as dividends but I am not sure about this. If some of these second year end dividend payment is year end cap gains, I would not count this as income. I am going to contact some of the fund companies on this but interested know if anyone has looked at this.
 

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