Personal Capital Personal Finance Tools Review

Breadth of Services

Personal Capital offers services to suit a wide range of customers, from people who are looking simply to get a handle on saving and goal setting to sophisticated investors seeking to build and execute a personal investment strategy.

You can link and track a wide range of financial accounts, including your 401K, IRA, and other investment portfolios with Personal Capital. Budget creation, tracking, and bill paying are not part of Personal Capital’s basic service. But the company does offer some extras with their basic service that others do not. For example, Personal Capital offers a cash flow analysis feature and planning tools, including a customizable Financial Roadmap, that help you set goals and analyze your progress towards saving for key life events like retirement or funding your kids’ education.  

Screenshot from personalcapital.com, August 2020

Personal Capital offers its own savings account, known as Personal Capital Cash. The account has a number of attractive features, including a no-minimum balance requirement, no fees, and a reasonable 0.5% APY interest rate. You can make as many transfers as you wish to your Personal Capital Cash account and link it to an external checking account to fund your routine bill-paying activity.

Customers who step up to Personal Capital’s paid service can access various strategic planning tools to create an investment portfolio that's in keeping with their goals, risk tolerance, and investment philosophy. For example, Personal Capital offers a specialized portfolio for socially responsible investors which focuses on assets that are managed with an eye towards sustainability, fair labor practices, and fair governance.  

All Personal Capital portfolios are built upon a few basic principles—smart weighting, tax optimization, intelligent rebalancing, and dynamic allocation—to help investors achieve the highest return on their investments.

Pricing

Personal Capital offers both free and paid versions. The free app affords you the opportunity to gain perspective on overall your net worth and financial status. The more accounts you link to the Personal Capital app, the more it can tell you about your financial status. Once again, the app does not include personalized budget creation, budget tracking, or an integrated bill-paying feature. These are standard features of some apps and some customers may view them as indispensable. Personal Capital is definitely more of a long-term strategic and investment app and not a day-to-day money manager.

Paid subscribers are known as Private Clients on Personal Capital. In addition to all features offered by the free version of the app, Private Clients can rely on Personal Capital as an investment advisor and portfolio management service. To become a Private Client, you must have potential investment assets of $200,000 or more. The company charges Private Clients a management fee equal to 0.89% of their invested assets up to $1,000,000. That is slightly below average when compared with traditional investment advisors but considerably higher than you would pay if you invested through a robo advisor service. Oddly, fees increase for users investing more than $1,000,000. The opposite is often true with other wealth management companies.

Educational Resources

Personal Capital offers a comprehensive library of articles on its blog to help visitors improve their overall financial literacy. Topics range from how to work with a financial advisor to retirement planning to taxes and insurance. The company publishes Daily Capital, where investors can read timely news that may inform their investment decisions, including weekly market recaps in digest form. You can also dig into specific areas of interest by reading Personal Capital’s guides on such topics as financing a vacation home, investing in line with your social values, tax loss harvesting, and more. Personal Capital’s breadth of information on retirement planning really stands out, too. 

Customer Experience

One of the most important things we can tell you about Personal Capital is that the company acts as a customer fiduciary. That means, unlike some other apps and investment advisors you might use, Personal Capital is legally bound to make recommendations that are exclusively in its clients’ best interest. You’d like to think that was the case with any investment advisor you engage, but it isn’t. Other non-fiduciary companies may prioritize their own financial gain while providing investment advice. 

Personal Capital encourages customers to take advantage of its free tools and doesn’t try to hard-sell you on its paid service. On the other hand, the company’s website does provide some unique insight into its wealth management services by publishing both its general and social responsibility methodology. When you open an account with Personal Capital—which takes just a few minutes and requires your answering a few basic questions about your goals and financial status—you are immediately offered the opportunity to schedule a free 30-minute phone meeting with one of the company’s advisors. This one-on-one chat is a great way to get your questions about Personal Capital answered so you can evaluate the service more effectively. 

Personal Capital’s privacy policy allows that the data it collects will only be used to provide the services you request through the app and to market the company’s own services to you. The company uses SSL encryption and other standard security means to protect your sensitive data. 

Reputation

Personal Capital earns an A rating with BBB and 4.4 out of 5 stars on Trust Pilot with over 500 reviews registered. While reviews on Trust Pilot are overwhelmingly positive, some users note that linking accounts can be problematic. Some accounts may not link automatically and may need to be input manually.  There are no complaints registered about Personal Capital with the CFPB. Users who have rated Personal Capital on the Apple App Store give Personal Capital 4.7 out of 5 stars and Google Pay users give it 4.4 out of 5 stars.

Personal Capital Summed Up

Personal Capital is perhaps the most comprehensive and sophisticated personal finance app we’ve reviewed. Its free version offers users quite a bit of financial control and insight. To access the more esoteric features of the app, though, you do need to have significant net worth. For personal finance novices, that makes it a great app to use and grow further into as they build financial skills.