Best Free Investing And Wealth Management Tool

Personal Capital free financial app - best free investing and wealth management too

The best free investing and wealth management tool online has the following attributes:

  1. Free
  2. Easy to use
  3. Helps you get a handle on your finances
  4. Has various tools for tracking cash flow, investments, and retirement planning
  5. Been around for years with great staff

After look everywhere online since 2009, when I started Financial Samurai, I believe that Personal Capital is the best free wealth management and investing tool today.

Personal Capital was founded in 2009 by ex-Paypal and Intuit CEO, Bill Harris. They have the best free investing and wealth management tools on the web today. I've been tracking my net worth with Personal Capital for free since the beginning and have been successfully able to optimize my finances to record highs as a result.

Personal Capital is based right here in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I have personally spent hundreds of hours meeting with senior management and consulting with the firm from nascent startup to now established personal finance stalwart. I've lived in San Francisco since 2001 and have direct access to all the innovators in the valley.

Here are all the reasons why you should sign up, especially if you are looking for investing and wealth management help beyond the simple budgeting software out there.

Personal Capital: Best free investing and wealth management tool

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 free personal finance tools

2) Net Worth Overview. The best free investing and wealth management tool let's us easily track our net worth. 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. The best free investing and wealth management tool enables us to track our 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 we're back to bull markets after the March 2020 coronavirus scare, 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. The best free investing and wealth management tool saves you money! 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. The best free investing and wealth management tool gives you 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. The best free investing and wealth management tool also helps you plan for your retirement the best.

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. Everybody should give it a try.

Planning for retirement when paying for private grade school - best free investing and wealth management too
Personal Capital sample retirement planner calculator. Are you on track? Click to find out.

Leverage Free Technology For Greater Wealth!

Get a handle on your finances by signing up with Personal Capital for free and aggregating all your accounts. It takes less than a minute to sign up, and allows you to even find a personal financial advisor if interested. I

spent the past 13 years meticulously tracking my own finances to achieve financial freedom. If I discovered Personal Capital earlier, I think I would have reached freedom even sooner! There is simply no other better FREE investing and wealth management tool on the web today.

Should I invest with Personal Capital?

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.

FinancialSamurai.com was started in 2009 and is one of the most trusted personal finance sites on the internet with over 1.5 million organic pageviews a month and growing. Financial Samurai has been featured in leading publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and The LA Times. 

Review Summary
Review Date
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Personal Capital
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Product Name
Personal Capital
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Product Availability
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