The best free money tool to manage your money is Personal Capital. Personal Capital was founded in 2009 by ex-Paypal and Intuit CEO Bill Harris. They have the best free money 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.
Here are all the reasons why you should sign up, especially if you are looking for budgeting and cash flow management help. Everybody should be leveraging the free tools on the internet to achieve financial freedom sooner, rather than later!
Personal Capital's Best Free Money Tools
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.
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.
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!
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.
Your risk tolerance is likely an illusion. Therefore, Personal Capital can help you understand your risk tolerance better.
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. Learn more about how you can reduce 401k fees with 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. The best free money tools helps make you a better investor.
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. The best free money tools always have specific action items.
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 retirement 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.
9) Amazing Recession Stimulator.
After COVID-19 hit, Personal Capital's engineers decided to create a new tool for free, the Recession Stimulator to model how your portfolio will do during bad times. This is great for an unknown future. Thankfully, we know how to make money during the next downturn.
Personal Capital Is The Best Free Tool
Now that you know the best free money tools are Personal Capital and perhaps NewRetirement, you can put these best free money tools to work.
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 link all your accounts. Take control of your financial future. You've only got one shot!
About the Author: Sam began 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 of investing by spending the next 13 years after college working at Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse, two of the leading financial institutions. During this time, Sam received his MBA from UC Berkeley with a focus on finance and real estate.
About Financial Samurai: FinancialSamurai.com was started in 2009 and is one of the most trusted personal finance sites today with over 1.5 million organic pageviews a month. Financial Samurai has been featured in top publications such as the LA Times, The Chicago Tribune, Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal. He loves evaluating the best free money tools to help people grow their wealth. Check out his Top Financial Products page for more.