Best Financial Software To Manage Your Money For Retirement

Personal Capital mobile apps

The best financial software to manage your money for retirement is made by Personal Capital.

One of the best ways to grow your wealth is to leverage financial software to track, measure, and optimize. I've used financial software since 1996 to grow my wealth with a simple Excel spreadsheet.

There's been a plethora of new financial innovation over the years, and after five years of research, I've narrowed down the best of the best financial software for 2019 and beyond based on the following stringent criteria.

1) Comprehensiveness of product

2) Ease of use

3) Accuracy

4) Multi-platform accessibility (laptop, mobile, tablet)

5) Cost

6) The people behind the product

Personal Capital, founded in 2009 by the former CEO of Intuit and Paypal, is the best financial software for people serious about achieving financial freedom sooner, rather than later.

They have the most comprehensive free financial tools, a slick interface that can be accessible on every digital platform, the most sophisticated analysis tools, and it's FREE!

Personal Capital Company Snapshot

Total Equity Funding: $200.3M in 7 Rounds from 11 Investors as of 2020. Purchase by Empower Retirement for $850 million.

Total Assets Under Management: $12.5 billion as of June 2020

Headquarters: Redwood City, California with offices in Denver, Atlanta, San Francisco

Description: Personal Capital is the leading digital wealth management firm.

Founders: Bill Harris, Louie Gasparini, Rob Foregger

Categories: Financial Services, Wealth Management, Finance, FinTech

Sign up link: Personal Capital

Company Details

Founded: July 1, 2009

Contact: press@personalcapital.com | (855) 855-8005

Employees: ~400 as of 2H2020

Personal Capital is an online investment advisory platform that provides its clients with electronically facilitated wealth management services, objective advice, and strategies.

It charges are based on a percentage of assets managed by the platform, including wealth management, trade costs, and custody.

The best financial software also summarizes its users’ bank accounts, credit cards, mortgages, and other financial details together in one place. The platform also highlights its users’ long-term fiscal health over month-to-month spending with tools such as a visual graph of their investment allocation and a 401(k)-fee analyzer.

Personal Capital Management

Personal Capital current team

Personal Capital Funding History

Personal Capital Funding Rounds

Best Financial Software: Personal Capital

Here are eight reasons why Personal Capital has the best financial software. It's free too.

1) Simplicity And Less Stress. Before Personal Capital, I had to log into eight different financial institutions to track over 30 different financial accounts ranging from brokerage accounts, money market accounts, CD accounts, checking accounts, IRA, and my 401K.

My finances were a mess, and I'm sure your finances could use some organization as well. Now I can just log into Personal Capital to see how everything is doing in one place. It's important to have a holistic view of your overall financial health so you know where to allocate resources.

Personal Capital Dashboard Widgets

2) Net Worth Overview. Gone are the days where you have to use an Excel spreadsheet to manually update every single asset and liability line item to calculate your net worth. Personal Capital updates your net worth automatically as soon as you log in because all your accounts are linked.

They provide a pie chart of your assets as well as gives you a historical chart of your net worth progression. If you cannot find an account in their database, you can simply add it yourself. Personal Capital will also conveniently e-mail you a weekly snap shot of your latest net worth along with how the markets did, upcoming bills, latest insightful blog posts and accounts that need your attention. Below is a sample headline snapshot.

Personal Capital Net Worth Tracking

3) Tracks Your Cash Flow. Budgeting is personal finance 101. By tracking your income and your spending like a hawk, you will be able to save a lot more money than if you simply tried to guess everything. Think about all the times you withdrew cash from the ATM machine and had no idea where all the money went a couple days later.

Aggregating all your accounts allows you to see where all your money is going. In the example above, this entrepreneur brought in over $38,000 in income and spent only $3,096. Now that's great cash flow!

Personal Capital Cash Flow Tracker

4) Helps You Balance Risk. With so many accounts, it's often hard to see exactly what's going where. For example, so many people were too overweight stocks before the financial crash in 2009. With Personal Capital, you can easily see where the imbalances are in your net worth so you can make smart adjustments. Now that it's a bull market, investors are probably too overweight equities and way underweight bonds once again. The Investment Checkup tool analyzes your portfolio's holdings based on size, style, and sector.  Personal Capital excels for those who have assets in the stock market. Personally, I like to maintain a 35%, 35%, 30% split between stocks, real estate, and CDs/bonds.

Portfolio Risk

5) Helps Reduce Fees. One of my favorite tools Personal Capital provides is their Portfolio Fee Analyzer. I ran my 401K through their fee analyzer and discovered that I am paying over $1,750 a year in management fees. I had no idea that my Fidelity Large Cap Growth fund cost $1,200 a year due to a 0.74% expense ratio compared to sub 0.3% for my Vanguard Funds.

As a result, I found a similar Large Cap index fund instead and am now saving $1,000 a year. Without Personal Capital, I would have spent over $87,000 in excessive fees over the next 20 years. Take a look at my example below. Portfolio fees are a serious problem which will rob you of your retirement wealth if you are not careful. Don't let ignorance rob you of your financial well being.

Mutual Fund Fees Graph Personal Capital

6) Shows Your Portfolio's Investment Efficiency. Based on your risk tolerance and investment objectives questionnaire, Personal Capital will give you an idea of where your current allocation is on the Efficient Frontier Curve. The Efficient Frontier Curve is the best returns for a certain level of risk. You want to be on the curve and not above or below.

Risk Return Personal Capital

7) Recommends Specific Dollar Amounts To Invest. Financial advice is useless if there is no actionable advice. Personal Capital will recommend the specific dollar amounts to invest or reinvest in each asset class to get you to an optimal asset allocation. In this example below, the investor is too heavily weighted in cash. In order to get to his recommended target allocation the investor needs to increase stock holdings by roughly $200,000 and bond holdings by roughly $100,000. The fun part is figuring out which index funds to invest in each category. All investment related charts and analysis can be found in the Investing tab.

Personal Capital Recommendation Of Assets

8) The Best Retirement Planning Calculator. Personal Capital has the best retirement calculator on the market because it uses real data and Monte Carlo simulations to come up with the most realistic financial scenarios for your future. Other calculators simply ask you to guess input values to then come up with your financial future.

The problem with this method is that we often underestimate how much we are saving and spending. You can input different life events such as a wedding or home purchase in your cash flow statement and recalculate your financial future to see how you'll do. The best financial software has so much flexibility.

Planning for retirement when paying for private grade school
Personal Capital sample retirement planner calculator. Are you on track? Click to find out.

Cash flow statement for private grade school budget

Leverage The Best Financial Software For Greater Wealth!

Get a handle on your finances by signing up with Personal Capital for free and aggregating all your accounts. Personal Capital also launched a savings account feature in 2019 with a competitive interest rate of 2.3%.

Their financial management tools are free, takes less than a minute to sign up. Your financial future is too important to be left up to chance! The best financial software can help you build wealth over time.

Personal Capital Review

About the Author: Sam has been investing his own money ever since he opened an online brokerage account in 1995. Sam loved investing so much that he decided to make a career out it by spending the next thirteen years after college working at Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse Group. During this time Sam earned his MBA from UC Berkeley with a focus on finance and real estate. 

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