PersonalCapital.com is a company that strives to offer personal financial services online. It sets apart itself from other personal finance websites by its potential management of its user’s assets. It provides financial tracking software at no cost, followed by generating a personal financial plan, making it easily manageable to its users. Its users get a chance to track their expenses and investment portfolio at no cost to them. There is no fee charged for the base service offered.
How Does PersonalCapital.com Function?
At the start of the process, your financial information will have to be input into their system. Information of the personal accounts and its passwords also need to be input into their site. Their site is secure and hence there is better security offered for your private data. Your latest balance is acquired every night when their servers log into all your accounts. After obtaining the required information, a serious of graphs and charts are generated by their web-based software. You then get a clear idea of your investments, savings, etc. and they assist you to relate your situation in terms of the market performance. They also lend a helping hand to build your personal strategy as well as personal fund to aid you in attaining your set goals.
Personal Capital does not charge any fees to have your profile set up and to input your financial information. They only charge if you opt to let them manage your portfolio and you obtain the services of a certified financial planner in exchange for your fees. It is not mandatory to utilize their wealth management services. You can even do the management by yourself or hire your own wealth manager to take care of it, while you can make use of the data aggregation and reporting services free of cost.
Highlights of Personal Capital
Security
The security on the website of Personal Capital is very high and the company extends its measures to ensure that your data is protected from identity theft or hacking. Some of the best security features are built into the site. It is also important that its users choose a password with high strength as that is essential to enjoy solid security.
The Universal Checkbook
Personal Capital claims that their Universal Checkbook is the only checkbook that you will ever need. It is a very good tool to make money transfers between any of your accounts.
Tracking of Stock Options
An application from Personal Capital tracks the value of any stock options owned by its users and assists in making informed decisions as to whether those stock options can be exercised or not and when to exercise them. Their application also has a “what if” calculator that guides its users through various scenarios.
Optimization of Your Taxes
The online tools from Personal Capital alert their users to imbedded capital losses in their portfolio, thereby aiding in minimizing of capital gains tax exposure. This lets you get benefits of strategies towards tax loss harvesting.
Advantages of Personalcapital.com
Simplicity in Usage
It is very easy to sign up at Personal Capital. It will require you to input your email address and phone number and then to set a password, for the creation of your account. Following that, you will have to enter your financial accounts information which could seem to be very wearisome. Nevertheless, this financial aggregation website will prove to be very beneficial when you have more number of accounts.
Proficient Financial Advice
During the early stage of the process itself, you are connected to a financial planner on the phone, who can prevent you from committing costly and common investing mistakes and can assist you in the avoidance of risky investments unnecessary for your situation.
Transparency in Fees
There is very good transparency in fees on the payments you make in Personal Capital’s financial accounts. At other financial sites in which most of the tasks are done by yourself, the fees paid by users for those sites is higher in comparison to the amount paid for Personal Capital’s asset-under-management (AUM) fees.
Responsibilities of Fiduciary
Personal Capital, being a registered investment advisor follows a legal standard which is much higher than the others and it is termed as the “fiduciary standard”. It implies that the recommendations made by them should not only be appropriate, but if their users opt to hold on to their investment advisory services, then the client’s account handling and recommendations made to them should have the best interest of the client as the only factor. This is usually not found in brokers who make suitable recommendations to clients, according to what is good for their own pockets.
Compatible with iPad
The applications of Personal Capital are available to the users of iPad.
Cons of PersonalCapital.com
Security Concerns
The security features from Personal Capital are outstanding, yet the concern is that, if your password can be guessed or stolen, it could result in tremendous harm to the account holders. The criminals will be able receive access to your each and every financial account, if they will be able to log into the aggregate site account with your password.
How is PersonalCapital.com differ from Mint.com?
I already have a Mint account so why will I need to sign up for PersonalCapital.com? Because Personalcapital.com is a investment centric version of Mint. Mint’s weakness is its inability to analyze and track investments. Mint is a great tool for simple budgeting but when you move to investments, it is very cumbersome and lacks any performance monitoring tool. Personalcapital.com is great for investments and retirement related tracking.
Conclusion
Personal Capital’s assistance in setting up asset allocation can be very beneficial, even if its users are not eligible to retain their money management services due to possessing less than $100,000 in investable assets. The fundamental aid offered by them can extend a helping hand to attain financial objectives.
Originally posted 2012-11-21 06:00:01. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
