Personal Capital: is the best tool for managing your Net worth

Personal Capital: is the best tool for managing your Net worth:

For a while I was a big fan of Intuit’s Mint.com especially since it’s same ownership as TurboTax, but now Personal Capital is my best tool for managing Net worth and personal finances.  For many reasons, but first off…it’s free.  Secondly the Investment analysis is top notch.

My dream of early retirement and enjoying life on a beach is closer now than it’s ever been – and I’m still in my early 30’s.  The insurance game is great, but if I had to choose between financial freedom and the insurance game, well I guess I choose both.  But the financial freedom I seek is similar to most, a nice feeling to have peace of mind.

If anything I can always write about Insurance topics while on the beach.  But back to Personal Capital.

Personal Capital

I am really happy with this software.  They have a great Net-worth Dashboard, to link all your online accounts and track your Net Worth.  Although I may be extreme (I review it daily – I wake up and log into the mobile app) I think many will benefit from this type of information.   If you wanted to track and tag all transactions to manage your budgets and plan spending, it is possible.  I still use Mint.com for this process since my rules are already set.  But it helps with organizing my rental properties expenses and income from my personal expenses.

The Investing management tabs of Personal Capital are the best.  You can review the following:

• Your holdings
• Balances
• Performance compared to benchmarks
• Allocations
• Sectors

The retirement planner is top notch, they run a Monte Carlo scenario on my retirement goals both spending and income.

Comparing my current allocation with target allocation,  plus analyzing my portfolio risk and where it lies on the efficient frontier.  While giving advice about portfolio allocation and re balancing (if necessary).

The retirement fee analyzer is also the real deal for those of us who want to keep fees low.

Using Personal Capital, I have seen my Net-worth grow over almost $400k in the last year and it has allowed me to have a lower risk and balanced portfolio.  Keeping in mind the market return was a large part of this growth, but I didn’t miss out on or under perform the market.  At moderate risk, I think this is a win.

After switching to Personal Capital, I realized my savings and investing rate were too low for my income and expenses.  I now save ~30% of my gross income to both investment and smaller allocation to Emergency savings and rainy day funds.   This doesn’t include my bonus or company profit share, (since those are not guaranteed) I don’t include in my savings rate – but if included I can get my % of savings/invested well over my goal.  My goal is to get the % up to 50% within the next two years and continue to grow Net-worth.

For those millennials out there like myself, I recommend using tools like Personal Capital.  The good news…if you use the link above you will get a free $20 for utilizing.  Trust me it is worth it without the $20.  Plus Personal Capital is accommodating with linking with some of the other great new FinTech tools out there for balancing portfolios, like Betterment and Wealthfront.  More to follow about these tools, but I plan on showing some screen shots of each of these tools in future posts.

Again, I think Personal Capital is the best tool for managing your Net Worth.

Comment below if you have other recommendations.