The best digital wealth advisor for your money is Personal Capital. I've spent the past 8 years analyzing everyone one, and I like the hybrid approach to Personal Capital's wealth advisory business. They were founded in 2011 by the ex-CEO of Intuit and Paypal, Bill Harris.
Digital Wealth Advisors (aka robo-advisors) are a class of financial adviser that provide financial advice or portfolio management online with minimal human intervention. They provide digital financial advice based on mathematical rules, so called algorithms.
These algorithms are executed by software. Therefore, financial advice no longer requires a human advisor but a software that utilizes its algorithms to automatically allocate, manage and optimize clients’ assets.
Here's a comprehensive review on why using Personal Capital to grow your wealth is one of the best things you can ever do for your money. The runner up is Betterment, based in NYC.
The Best Digital Wealth Advisor: Personal Capital
Here are all the reasons why Personal Capital is the best digital wealth advisor.
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. The best digital wealth advisor makes sure you are always on top of your money.
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. Then you 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. Then you you can make smart adjustments. The best digital wealth advisor is always trying to help you manage risk.
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. Â 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.
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. Amazingly, I discovered that I was 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.
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.
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.
8) The Best Retirement Planning Calculator. Personal Capital has the best retirement calculator on the market. 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. It will recalculate your financial future to see how you'll do. Everybody should give it a try.
The Best Digital Wealth Advisor For Your Money
Get a handle on your finances by signing up with Personal Capital for free and aggregating all your accounts. The financial management tools are free, takes less than a minute to sign up. Take charge of your financial future!
About the Author: Sam worked in investing banking for 13 years at GS and CS. He received his undergraduate degree in Economics from The College of William & Mary and got his MBA from UC Berkeley. In 2012, Sam was able to retire at the age of 34. His investments that now generate roughly $250,000 a year in passive income, most recently helped by real estate crowdfunding. He spends most of his time playing tennis and taking care of his family. Financial Samurai was started in 2009 and is one of the most trusted personal finance sites on the web.