Financial planning often revolves around budgeting, taxes, investments, and retirement goals. That's a lot of things to manage. Fortunately, the ever-growing fintech industry has revamped their services to make finances easier to understand and manage. While many budgeting apps out there help you track your savings and expenses every month, you may need a different app to manage your investments. It's quite rare for financial apps to cover the entire spectrum of personal finance in one. That is no longer the case.
Personal Capital, a California-based wealth management firm, offers a range of award-winning financial tools for free, plus a cutting-edge robo-advisor with a human touch for complete financial oversight and control. At present, Personal Capital helps 2.7 million people manage their finances with over $20.8 billion worth of assets under management.
Free Budgeting Platform and Investment Planner
After signing up through their iOS or Android app, you can link all of your financial accounts like 401(k)s, mortgages, loans, credit cards, bank accounts through their secure 256-bit AES encrypted platform for a vivid picture of your net worth, monthly cash flow trends, and overall current financial stature - all in one place. Furthermore, the app will remind you of upcoming monthly payments for your personal loans and credit card debts so you won't risk defaulting on them.
Their feature-rich and free investment tools offer a complete investment review when you safely link your investment accounts. Personal Capital's proprietary tech will combine all your assets into the "You Index" and compare it with major indexes such as the S&P 500 to help you understand where you stand and whether you are investing your money in the right avenues.
Moreover, their free retirement planner allows you to gauge your retirement preparedness with a retirement readiness score after you input details like your age, income, risk appetite, expected income from Social Security, and plans to claim it. This way, you'll get an overview of how much you are likely to save, an estimate of your Social Security income, where you stand with respect to your goals and timeline, and whether you are saving enough for retirement every year. It also offers suggestions to help you make impactful changes.
Personal Capital also makes security their top-most priority. Along with military-grade encryption, they employ an added layer of protection with multi-factor authentication and fingerprint verification. As a fiduciary, they promise not to sell your data, either. They also employ frequent security and penetration testing on their platform to keep all of your data safe.
Free Retirement Fee Analyzer
Whether you invest through a brokerage account or a company-provided 401(k) plan, you will pay a fee that generally goes towards account management and maintenance. These fees are usually lower for Exchange-traded Funds (ETFs) since they are passively managed as compared to actively managed accounts such as mutual funds.
Whatever the fees, a lot of people fail to understand that these fees are usually a percentage of their assets. This means that as your asset value grows, you'll be paying a bigger chunk of money for the same percentage of fees annually, over time. If unchecked, investment fees could stunt your wealth growth by hundreds of thousands of dollars over decades.
Personal Capital's retirement fee analyzer will detail the annual expenses you incur for investing in a stock, bond, or an ETF, and compare it with how your portfolio could look without the fees that come with the right investments and asset allocation. You can then make the changes yourself or employ Personal Capital to do it for you with the guidance of a vetted fiduciary advisor.
Create a Financial Fortress With Personal Capital's High-End Robo-Advisor
Traditionally, if you were to seek financial advice and guidance to manage your portfolio built from your life savings, you'd have to seek out an in-house financial advisor who'd cost you 1 to 2 percent of assets under management (AUM). For a $1 million portfolio, that means paying your advisor anywhere between $10,000 to $20,000 annually.
Nowadays, robo-advisors are very popular because of the low fees and hands-off investing approach. With the help of artificial intelligence working on mega-repositories of market data, these evolving algorithm-driven entities can monitor your investments 24/7, reduce your fees, and even make smart investment decisions on your behalf. While robo-advisors are evolving, they are generally suited best for small- to medium-sized portfolios and often don't offer live access to a human financial advisor.
Personal Capital bridges this gap. Their robo-advisor comes with access to live fiduciary financial advisors who can help you set up a complete long-term financial plan, answer all your questions over phone or email, and prevent financial pitfalls during market upheavals.
If you have $100,000 worth of assets you want to manage, you can choose to access their top-end robo-advisor with access to one fiduciary financial advisor for a fee of 0.89 percent of AUM annually. If you are willing to manage $1 million in assets, your fee goes down accordingly with access to two financial advisors and their core investment committee. These fees are generally lower compared to an in-house financial advisor, and you will get access to their cutting-edge robo-advisor's wealth management features as well.
How Does Personal Capital Manage Your Investments?
One intriguing concept with Personal Capital is that you can employ the robo-advisor to design an investment portfolio tailored to your retirement dream and short-term financial goals. After answering a simple questionnaire about your risk tolerance, your retirement plans, and your investment budget; the app will run Monte Carlo Simulations to understand your chances of reaching your retirement goals. It will then suggest low-cost ETFs with active components like stocks and bonds in an attempt to maximize returns by lowering market-associated risks.
Personal Capital is backed by world-renowned strategists, industry leaders, and key contributors with decades of experience who follow fiduciary standards to create tax-efficient investment portfolios in this highly-dynamic market. Those following fiduciary standards are ethically and legally bound to recommend the best possible investment opportunities for your portfolio.
Personal Capital has Harry Markowitz as a portfolio strategy expert, who is also known as the "Father of Modern Portfolio Theory". He is a recipient of the John von Neumann Theory Prize and Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics Sciences and is a key contributor at the emerging firm.
Personal Capital's robo-advisor employs the "smart weighting" strategy to give you an edge over passive investing with the option to add stocks and bonds favored to perform in the long-term, in smaller quantities, under the guidance of financial advisors.
Ultimately, you will be able to enjoy the automation and cutting-edge algorithms that come with their robo-advisor, and create an ETF-heavy portfolio with stocks and bonds in the asset allocation that suit you with the help of industry stalwarts and live fiduciary advisors that you can get in touch with to discuss problems with as needed.
Lastly, it wouldn't make sense to lose a chunk of your money to taxes even if your capital gains are on track with your investment goals. One way the robo-advisor's tax-loss harvesting feature can stop your taxes from rising abnormally is by allocating assets that pay regular income to tax-advantaged accounts like 401(k)s.
Check out Personal Capital's award-winning financial tools today.
