Personal Capital Review: Online Financial Management

What is Personal Capital?

Personal Capital lets you see all your financial accounts in one place. In a way, it’s like Mint.com, but on steroids. If you want detailed stats on all your investments, objective financial advice, and you want to view it all in one place, you seriously need to look at Personal Capital.

With Personal Capital, you can see your net worth at a glance by syncing your checking, retirement, investment, college savings, mortgages, loans, and just about every financial account you have.

Even more, Personal Capital exists to give you unbiased financial advice. You can use the free tools to view all your financial accounts in one place and get objective advice on whether or not you’re paying too much in fees or if your investments are under-performing.

But here’s what makes Personal Capital different from other financial management companies: they offer the option to actually manage your assets for a fee. Of course, anyone can use Personal Capital’s free of charge, but this management feature has been much needed in the online financial management world.

Sounds Great, But How Much is Personal Capital?

Everyone can create a Personal Capital account absolutely free. Here’s what the CEO of Personal Capital Bill Harris (a former CEO of Paypal and Intuit) has to say about it:

We help you gather, and view and understand all your assets for free. Then if you want us to help manage those assets, we’ll do all of that for less than 1% per year.

If you have at least $100,000 in assets, Personal Capital will manage the assets within your portfolio for an investment fee in the range of 0.75% to 0.95% based on your balance. The fees are as follows:

0.95% of your assets to manage the first $250,000
0.90% of your assets to manage the next $250,000
0.85% of your assets to manage the next $500,000
0.80% of your assets to manage the next $4,000,000
0.75% of your assets to manage anything over $5,000,000

Less than 1% is great when it comes to financial advice and portfolio management. Of course, Personal Capital is completely free unless you actually want them to manage the assets in your portfolio.

Personal Capital Features

Here are just some of the great features of Personal Capital:

Portfolio Performance: Track every investment and sort by account, investment class, and fund performance with a simple click.

Asset Allocation: Find out how diversified your entire portfolio is with a simple to view summary.

Mobile Control: Access your information on the go with the secure Personal Capital apps.

Free Investment Checkup: Personal capital automatically checks for investment risks in your portfolio and notifies you if your investment goals look compromised.

Free 401(k) Fee Analyzer: Are you paying too much in 401(k) fees? Not even sure what your fees are?? Personal Capital has you covered.

Mutual Fund Fee Calculator: This interactive tool ultimately saves you money by clearly showing what you’re paying in fees on your mutual funds.

Universal Checkbook: This amazing feature lets you send money to anyone at any time with a few clicks on your phone. Enroll a checking account and you’re set! Read more about that feature.

Is Personal Capital Safe?

The short answer: most definitely. Identity theft is a real concern, especially in a day where so much of our personal information is online. The online security measures used by Personal Capital are the same that you’ll find with the most trusted banks. They use a two step verification system that verifies your password as well as your actual computer.

According to their website, “your data is stored at a PCI-compliant data center that uses the same secure AES 256-bit encryption in use at major banks and financial institutions worldwide. We perform regular 3rd party security audits, and use RSA, Verisign and other industry state of the art security solutions and practices to protect our site.