Personal Cap app and service

[explanade]

Anyone try it?

Aggregates your accounts into a free app.

They dangle the carrot of free financial advice once you link accounts with total assets of $100k.

So what is their angle? Not seeing advertising in the app. But they clearly want the eyeballs od the well off.

I avoided services like mint.com because of wariness about entering account login info, though I do it for quicken and turbotax.

 

[explanade]

Oh it's personalcapital.com

 

[heeyy_joe]

I use Fidelity's FULLVIEW feature. Very nice.

 

[walkinwood]

I haven't tried this app or others like it. Security fears keep me from giving unknown apps my account information. Who knows what their security policies are and how well they execute on them.

One of these days, I'll try mint.com since it is widely used and their security policies have been scrutinized a lot.

 

[sengsational]

Since I'm leery of giving out my account credentials to anyone, but still want to have a consolidated view, I wrote a program that scrapes all my financial sites and puts all the data in a unified format into a spreadsheet for me.

 

[seraphim]

Morningstar portfolio works well for me. Doesnt need account information - just input changes manually.

 

[Greg V]

The Personal Capital dashboard is a very good depiction of your Investment and Cash Flow situation. The Asset Allocation view gives a nice breakdown with good detail. I've found it gives a useful, overall picture of my finances. I tried similar features on the Fidelity and USAA sites, but they weren't quite as comprehensive. To be fair, it's been a while since trying both Fidelity and USAA, so they may have added more capabilities.

I listened to the Personal Capital pitch for managing my investments, politely declined and have not gotten any pressure or selling since.

To use any of these sites you must be willing to enter the info needed for the service to access your accounts and update the info. All in all it's been a good experience for me.

 

[savory]

I recently loaded Likeassets. I like the way it consolidates my account information. But, it is not reporting everything correctly. I am working with them and hope they can determine why the reporting is not correct. They have identified one problem which resulted from a reverse stock split. The other problem(s) have not been identified yet.

For the parts that I believe are reporting correctly, the tool does a nice job of consolidating information. It takes the Yodlee information to another level but does not replace Yodlee. If I had to choose between the two tools, I would select Yodlee. I am hoping that LA gets it right or I might move to one of the other tools.

 

[Sesq]

I don't want to get the sales pitch call so I don't use their service. I do use mint and their investment tab is pretty mediocre.

I recently set up a google spreadsheet which will do 20 minute delay tickers "=googlefinance(ticker)" and I really like the way I can use that to summarize my info. I use mint to monitor my total shares held (accounting for ongoing 401(k) contributions and re-invested dividends) and manually adjust my spreadsheet. They then have a decent list of characteristics to monitor, like ytd return, 52 week return, etc.

 

[pb4uski]

I use Quicken and Vanguard Portfolio Watch. Basic but sufficient for my needs and I don't care to give my account access details out.

 

[explanade]

I've been using Quicken Essentials for the Mac. So the software is offline. Yet you need to create an account for Quicken or Intuit connect which is where you enter all the login details, so that it can pull down all the data for you.

So there doesn't seem to be a truly offline software for aggregating all your different accounts.

The spreadsheet idea is good, so you don't directly enter your accounts. But you have to update and reconcile all the DRIP and cap gains distributions transactions. Very tedious manual process to update the number of shares.

So I guess it's a fight between convenience and privacy.

One thing I don't like about Quicken though is that it uses projected cash balance rather than the actual cash balance in your checking and savings as part of your total net worth calculation.

In my case, it's overestimating my cash by like 40-50%. Really stupid, because it reads the qfx files that I download from my credit union, which is not in Quicken's list of institutions from which it downloads account data and it correctly shows the online or actual balances.

Yet it chooses to come up with a projected balance for those accounts and use them in the net worth total.

That is why I was looking for alternatives.

 

[pb4uski]

.....One thing I don't like about Quicken though is that it uses projected cash balance rather than the actual cash balance in your checking and savings as part of your total net worth calculation.....

You can opt to use actual cash balances rather than projected cash balances in the net worth on the menu bar.

Click on the customize "star" in the upper right hand corner of the menu bar. In the Accounts window that opens, click on Options in the bottom left hand corner. I'm guessing that when you do that there will be a check next to "Show ending balance in Account Bar" - change it to "Show net worth in Account Bar" and then click on Done in the lower right hand corner of the Accounts window. Your Account Bar should then show current balances rather than projected balances.

 

[explanade]

Actually, it's Quicken Essentials for the Mac. Seems to be a different program.

Accounts Summary lists the balances of each account and has a Net Worth at the bottom but no way to configure them.

 

[explanade]

I don't want to get the sales pitch call so I don't use their service. I do use mint and their investment tab is pretty mediocre.

I recently set up a google spreadsheet which will do 20 minute delay tickers "=googlefinance(ticker)" and I really like the way I can use that to summarize my info. I use mint to monitor my total shares held (accounting for ongoing 401(k) contributions and re-invested dividends) and manually adjust my spreadsheet. They then have a decent list of characteristics to monitor, like ytd return, 52 week return, etc.

I set up a spreadsheet on Google Drive after reading this post. I will have to manually adjust changes in the number of shares but that shouldn't be too bad.

That's the tradeoff for not having to store your login credentials with a third party.

I also updated my other accounts on my Vanguard account and they calculate my overall AA pretty quick, into a nice pie chart.

What would be nice is if there's a way to chart my totals or total net worth over time.

I'm wondering if setting up a portfolio on Google or Yahoo Finance might have such charting.

Otherwise, I see more iPad apps, like Wikinvest Portfolio HD, which also requires setting up an account and storing all your login data with it.

Another free one is Real-time Stock Tracker, which sees to be overall for stock tracking but also has portfolio features. This one may be more like entering data manually rather than have data pulled down from your accounts.


Edit -- Okay Google Finance does track your portfolio prices and you can compare the chart against the S&P and other indices over time. Only downside is that you have to store it on your Google account, which means they can data mine the investments you have and so on.

I'm more leery of a company like Google, which will sell you out to advertisers, than maybe Yahoo. There is no app, so you have to view in the iPad browser. Hmm ...

 

[explanade]

Vanguard iPad app now charts your total balance, which includes accounts outside of VG, if you enter all the symbols and shares manually.

It also shows some charts of asset allocation analysis, like your international equity allocation and so on.

 

[frayne]

I use Fidelity's FULLVIEW feature. Very nice.

Same here and I print out a hard copy at month end for my records.

 

[LOL!]

Vanguard iPad app now charts your total balance, which includes accounts outside of VG, if you enter all the symbols and shares manually.

It also shows some charts of asset allocation analysis, like your international equity allocation and so on.

Vanguard has always had their Portfolio Watch tool on their web site and one could always enter outside holdings. However, ....
the Portfolio Watch tool is rather flaky. For example, today it is telling me that we have 91% of our stocks in US equities and a further 87% in foreign equities.

 

[Huston55]

Vanguard has always had their Portfolio Watch tool on their web site and one could always enter outside holdings. However, ....
the Portfolio Watch tool is rather flaky. For example, today it is telling me that we have 91% of our stocks in US equities and a further 87% in foreign equities.

That settles it!

I'm transferring all my accounts to Vanguard to get the immediate 78% return.