Personal Capital

[Brdofpray]

Has anyone had any experience with the app "Personal Capital"? I wonder how it compares to Mint, and any others.

 

[PeterA]

I briefly used it on the web. (I'm not sure whether by "app" you meant on a phone.) It didn't offer me much value over Mint. The only feature I found helpful was the one that tells you the expenses of your 401(k) plan--but it did not recognize my employer's 401(k) plan.

 

[Ready]

I use Personal Capital to track expenses. For iPad use, I find it much easier to use than the Mint app. And in general I like the look and feel of it better than Mint. The functionality appears to be very similar to Mint though.

I believe their goal is to sign you up as a client, which I find ironic because you find all kinds of articles and suggestions about lowering your fees. One section of the app tells you how much you can lower your fees by buying index funds while another section tries to sign you up to pay 1% in advisor fees to use their services. Pretty goofy if you ask me.

I did not use my real phone number and I use a junk email address that I don't check often, so I never hear from them. If I gave my real phone number, I suspect I would have been solicited by the advisor assigned to me. No big deal I suppose, but I think it's best to stay anonymous if you use their software. I would recommend the same for Mint, BTW.

 

[calmloki]

...

I believe their goal is to sign you up as a client, which I find ironic because you find all kinds of articles and suggestions about lowering your fees. One section of the app tells you how much you can lower your fees by buying index funds while another section tries to sign you up to pay 1% in advisor fees to use their services. Pretty goofy if you ask me.

I did not use my real phone number and I use a junk email address that I don't check often, so I never hear from them. If I gave my real phone number, I suspect I would have been solicited by the advisor assigned to me. No big deal I suppose, but I think it's best to stay anonymous if you use their software. I would recommend the same for Mint, BTW.

I did use my correct number, and think I had one call from an adviser in the last couple years, which was not at all hard sell. I didn't enter many of our accounts, being of a cautious nature, but it seems to work great.

 

[YeahNo]

I've been using personal capital for a few months. Long story short, it's an apples to oranges comparison. Mint is great for monthly budgeting and PC is great for keeping track of investment allocations and investment fees. I find it very useful to have a tool that tracks all of my investments together and then gives me an overview of it all. Thia type of tool(PC) is similar to what the 'professionals' use.

 

[cranberryjoe]

I tried personal capital a year or so ago for a few months. It did not work with my 401k account, which amounted to about half my investments at the time. It had troubles logging into some of my other accounts and repeatedly locked me out of one of my accounts. Too much hassle, so I canceled after a few months.

On the positive side, it did a great job of tracking asset classes among my various mutual funds. However, not being able to track my 401k meant its wonderful charts and reports and recommendations were largely useless.

 

[YeahNo]

I tried personal capital a year or so ago for a few months. It did not work with my 401k account, which amounted to about half my investments at the time. It had troubles logging into some of my other accounts and repeatedly locked me out of one of my accounts. Too much hassle, so I canceled after a few months.

On the positive side, it did a great job of tracking asset classes among my various mutual funds. However, not being able to track my 401k meant its wonderful charts and reports and recommendations were largely useless.

Interesting, I haven't had any issues with it locking me out of my accounts so maybe they have made updates since then. They also have tons of accounts you can link to, but I agree, if your specific investment account isn't in your list and it is a majority of your assets, I probably wouldn't use it either.

 

[Ready]

I have more problems getting Mint to work with my accounts than PC. I do recall PC being a bit rough a year ago, so I suspect they have made substantial improvements in the past year.

I really don't like the iPad app for Mint. It's typical Intuit, putting the least amount of development effort into a product they possibly can while still getting people to use it. It's just Quicken all over again.

 

[cranberryjoe]

Interesting, I haven't had any issues with it locking me out of my accounts so maybe they have made updates since then. They also have tons of accounts you can link to, but I agree, if your specific investment account isn't in your list and it is a majority of your assets, I probably wouldn't use it either.

The specific lockout issue only happened with one account (of about a dozen I had entered into PC) and happened about once a month. At the time I had no idea why it was happening, thinking maybe my account was being hacked. But when I deleted PC, mainly because it couldn't track my 401k, the mysterious account lockouts stopped. I can imagine they have made substantial improvements in the past year but I've since moved on.

 

[explanade]

Leery about entering my accounts there unless there's a clear benefit.

Even Quicken can't log into some of my accounts, including Vanguard, so I have to update manually.

PC doesn't let you enter share quantities manually?

 

[Dakotah]

So Far... So Good

I've been using PC for a couple weeks and so far I've been happy with it.
All of my accounts linked easily (Vanguard took a couple days) with exception of Treasury Direct.
PC is not magic but it is nice to get a snapshot of your finances in one convenient location on your I-phone, laptop , or desktop.

 

[FIREontheMountain]

I have been using PC for a few months now and took the call from one of their financial advisers. He gave me some great information about my accounts and has not tried to hard sell me at all. In fact, he agreed that it may not be the best move for me to use their service right now. I found the information he provided to be a great view into my accounts and forced me to spend some time thinking about my allocations in greater detail.

I use Mint for budgeting and PC for investment performance.

 

[explanade]

So are you required to give up a phone number?

And obviously if they're calling you, they can see your assets?

 

[FIREontheMountain]

So are you required to give up a phone number?

And obviously if they're calling you, they can see your assets?

I don't remember if the phone number was a requirement. I believe they started communicating over email. Yes, they can see the assets you enter into PC and/or whatever you tell them over the phone.

 

[Bert Cooper]

I love Personal Capital. I use it daily. I was a daily user of Mint until I found it. Still use Mint weekly. I know I'm not supposed to keep checking like a madman, but that's my gig right now. Allow me to list some pros and cons:

PC
Pro:
Better macro view of your finances & trends
Better investing handling
Great desktop and iPhone apps

Con:
Doesn't support linked accounts through my credit union
No budgeting

Mint
Pro:
Better micro view of your finances
Good budgeting
Great desktop and iPhone apps

Con:
Ads aka "Suggestions"
Weak investments support
Doesn't support JP Morgan 401Ks (blame each other)

 

[explanade]

I don't remember if the phone number was a requirement. I believe they started communicating over email. Yes, they can see the assets you enter into PC and/or whatever you tell them over the phone.

That's pretty useful information for them to have on your, being able to associate net worth with a person, maybe knowing their address and so forth.

Maybe that is part of their business, collecting all this valuable data on some relatively well-off individuals.

I like Quicken for not having to store that data on someone else's repository. In fact, I did set up some direct connect through Quicken Essentials but when I tried Quicken for Windows, I entered most of the data manually.

 

[obgyn65]

I have both and I prefer Mint on my iPhone and Personal Capital on my iPad.

Has anyone had any experience with the app "Personal Capital"? I wonder how it compares to Mint, and any others.

 

[Sesq]

If you are tempted by their advisory services, this thread is worth a read.

Bogleheads • View topic - Just got a free consultation by Personal Capital. Thoughts?

I have never used it, I use mint to aggragate the data and then I customize it in my personal spreadsheet. For investments I am in the accumulation stage and fund index funds so I don't need much. My spreadsheet calculates my AA and if it gets out of whack then I rebalance.

 

[Mo Money]

I like PC. True, they do have passwords and other personal info and my phone number, but there has been nothing but a single VM from them. No hard sell. I like the way it breaks down my asset categories, and it has some useful articles and automatically generated critiques of my portfolio.

It was a pain to get my retirement account linked, but eventually it did connect properly. I was even able to toss in other categories such as the equity in my house.

I never enjoyed Mint or found it to be user friendly. And I don't need any real budget help in any event, which seems to be a Mint strong point. I just want a good way to track assets and my overall net worth. In light of the miserable atrophy occurring at Net Worth IQ, I have found PC to be a decent replacement.

 

[Another Reader]

PC has the slickest version of the Yodlee software I have seen. I used Mint, but hated their condescending alerts and reminders. They went downhill after Intuit bought them and moved from Yodlee to proprietary software. I moved from Mint to Bank of America's My Portfolio, which grew increasingly buggy with the various updates. PC has the occasional failure to update some accounts and does not allow you to split expenditures. If I buy groceries, pet food and 100 rolls of paper towels at Costco, it's nice not to have to call it all groceries. Other than that, I like PC.

That said, their fees for asset management are ridiculous, and I'm not sure how long they will stay in business and support the software.

 

[Greg V]

In both OS X and IOS, PC has a really nice dashboard to view your investments and overall financial situation. I haven't used Mint, so I can't compare their product with PC.

I did listen to the complimentary pitch from PC and declined their offer to manage my accounts. I have not gotten any hard sell...just an occasional email when they have a new article or update to the site/app.

One thing PC offered me that no other similar site/app has (as far as I know) is the ability to import TSP fund data, including the "contents" of the different funds (for lack of a better term). I'm not sure if they have the actual asset info on the funds or just estimate it by using their benchmarks. Either way, this allows me to automatically get a good overall picture of my asset allocation that I would have had to manually estimate otherwise.

All in all, I find PC a useful tool to get an overall sense of my finances.

 

[Cobra9777]

I've used Mint and PC. They are very similar, but I prefer PC because it's more investment-oriented. Mint seems to be for people just starting out and trying to get a handle on spending, budgeting, debt reduction, etc.

PC definitely has some flaws. I have one bank account that won't update reliably. And it can't link to my wife's government pension site. I have some employee stock options that it counts as "alternative investments" instead of "domestic stock", which is how I view them. No capability to override allocation classifications. I also have some rental houses that I consider "investments" (part of my real estate allocation). PC treats them as personal assets... and again no capability to override. Bottom line, I use PC to decipher some of my mutual funds, but still use my own spreadsheet to track asset allocation.

On the plus side, the dashboard is easy to use and quite helpful to get a quick snapshot of exactly what I need to know. I was a slave to Quicken for many years, and never really got what I wanted. When Quicken started "forcing" you to buy updates, that was just the excuse I needed to try some of the online tools, which seem to be much better (and free).

I did have a 20-30 minute conversation with one of PC's advisers. He had some helpful advice on reducing expense and tax efficiency, but nothing I didn't already know about. No hard sell and no annoying emails or phone calls since.