How do you achieve financial
I’ll show you why Personal Capital will help save more, invest wisely, and have fun building your net worth.
Learn the essential Personal Capital features you must use, and why they’ll help you achieve financial independence.
Personal Capital is Your Money’s Mission Control
For financial tools, Personal Capital is the BEST to give you a top-level, bird’s eye view of your TRUE wealth.
Think of Personal Capital as the mission control for your financial life. It is designed to give you a holistic view of your net worth.
In Personal Capital’s view, the mission control of your financial life depends on one key metric: your net worth.
To track your net worth using Personal Capital, you must link every financial account you have to it and receive Personal Capital’s assessments, insights, and advice about your money.
The #1 Tool for Financial Freedom
While Personal Capital is NOT the most comprehensive financial tool, it rules where it matters.
You see, Personal Capital helps you set ambitious goals and tracks your progress toward meeting these goals with clarity and data:
With Personal Capital, I’m motivated to work hard, save more, invest wisely. I’m addicted to the game of accelerating my net worth and seeing myself conquering challenges.
The more you know, the better you can act. Personal Capital takes away your confusion and puts YOU in the driver’s seat to take control of your financial health.
And it does so in a way that doesn’t overwhelm you with information but focuses you to focus on the big picture.
Such as cash flow…. and of course, net worth.
It’s All About the Net Worth
Personal Capital is all about net worth. But why is net worth significant? And what is it, exactly?
Your net worth is a math equation: [ The things you own, or assets ] minus [ The stuff you owe, or liabilities ].
The significant things you own, or assets, include:
- Your cash and money in your checkings and savings accounts
- Your investments, including 401Ks, IRAs, and pensions
- Any individual bonds and stocks you own
- The equity value of your homes and cars
- Your valuables, such as jewelry and arts.
- Other assets you own (e.g., cryptocurrencies, properties, etc.)
The stuff you owe, or liabilities, consist of:
- The mortgages on your home
- Your cars loans
- Student loans and any other personal debts
- Any and all credit card debts
In fact, every financial account you have can be categorized as either an asset or a liability.
Once you link your financial accounts to Personal Capital, it’ll automatically categorize your assets and liabilities, and calculate your net worth for today and track its changes in the future.
Net Worth is the Real Wealth
Do you know who your most affluent friend is? Or who is your wealthiest distant relative?
Chances are you are thinking about that friend who owns a BMW, lives in a big house, travels to exotic countries (and gloat on Facebook about them).
Our society measures wealth by the outward appearance of wealth. But the appearance of wealth is NOT real wealth. Often, the opposite is true: those who show off are drowning in debt.
Net worth measures your TRUE wealth. Many people with a high net worth do not appear wealthy. Those who look wealthy may have negative net worth!
Instead of craving for the newest iPhone or getting excited to start your next luxury vacation, Personal Capital gets you excited about
You see, Personal Capital chose to focus on net worth because it motivates you to increase your real wealth, the kind that allows you to retire early and take care of your family.
Personal Capital Review: Five Features to Accelerate Your Goals
Do you want to set ambitious retirement goals and accelerate your pace achieving it? Then you must know these five features from this Personal Capital review to win the game of early retirement:
- Net Worth Calculator
- Retirement Planner
- Fee Analyzer
- Investment Checkup
- Track Your Cash Flow
The image below shows you where to navigate to access these features.
#1. Net Worth Calculator
The net worth calculator is the foundation of Personal Capital, the first step toward perfecting your retirement plan.
Track Your Net Worth Over Time
Personal Capital’s net worth calculator allows you to look at all the variables that make up your net worth and helps you understand how each has impacted your net worth over time.
You’ll learn which account is driving your net worth growth, and which is hurting your goals toward early retirement.
A Big Picture Created Just for You
We know that the 24/7 news cycle is intense enough to scare anyone into believing that the world might collapse tomorrow.
The net worth calculator allows you to step away from all that noise and focus on the big picture, your real wealth.
Reality Check on Debts
Building up assets is hard. But for some people, keeping debts under control is even harder.
The net worth calculator sheds light on the actual impact of spending and debts. That expensive wedding, that brand new BMW, or that impulse purchase? You have to make sure it’s worth it!
Perhaps seeing that massive drop in your net worth will make you rethink about the tradeoff between financial freedom versus instant gratification.
#2. Retirement Planner
The retirement planner is a game of how to better get rich faster and retire earlier. And I love playing with it.
It assesses how ready you are to retire by taking into account:
- Your target retirement date
- How much you want to spend during retirement
- Your net worth from now into retirement
Like a game, the retirement planner has certain assumptions it uses to calculate your chances of “winning” (or retire on time).
Your retirement planner will also take into account your expected Social Security after you retire and all sort of other major events.
It is up to you to figure out how to retire early and retire rich given the barriers you have today and events in the future.
#3. Fee Analyzer
People lose thousands of dollars a year to these fees and many don’t even know it’s happening! Over decades, high fees can dramatically slow down your retirement date.
Personal Capital’s fee analyzer tracks your fees across all of your investments account and lets you know if you’re paying too much.
The fee analyzer lets you precisely which fund has high fees and exactly how much that is impacting your net worth. It’s like a medical device that detects where you are unhealthy so you can fix it and get back on track.
#4. Investment Checkup
If there’s a way for you to eat more ice-cream without getting fat, who wouldn’t want to know how?
The Investment Checkup tool analyzes your investment portfolio’s asset allocation and points out how it can be improved.
Personal Capital not only points out how you can shuffle your assets to grow more
#5. Cash Flow Tool
Your expenses cut into your net worth. People will do better if they realize where they’re spending too much. That’s where the cash flow tool comes in.
The cash flow tool tells you how much you are spending across all of your accounts and spending categories.
You might learn that you spent $2,000 at Starbucks last year, a big chunk of your paycheck went to Uber rides, or that your restaurant expenses tripled.
Maybe you are okay with these expense, or perhaps you’ll be shocked. The cash flow tool helps you identify significant trends so YOU can make the best decision for your net worth.
Pro tip: compare how much you’ve spent for each category this month compared to last month, and look at expenses over a longer, 1-year period to identify big trends!
Personal Capital Review: What You Should Avoid?
Here are three pro tips on how to effectively avoid the dark side of Personal Capital that drives most customers insane.
#1. Do Not Pick Up Unknown Calls
One of the biggest complains from using Personal Capital’s free financial tool is that sooner or later, you’ll get sales calls from Personal Capital agents trying to
My advice:
Never pick up unknown calls, period.
A lot of people are angry at receiving Personal Capital’s unsolicited sales calls. They feel cheated and violated, and uncomfortable to being pressured.
But honestly, given how many robo-calls and scams there are today, you shouldn’t pick up unknown calls at all.
To be clear, I don’t recommend Personal Capital’s investment advisory services. I don’t think you should feel pressured listen to them.
Got a call from Personal Capital? Hang up immediately.
#2. Don’t Sweat if You Can’t Connect
Personal Capital tries to automatically link any account from major banks, mutual funds, and local credit unions and small brokerage firms.
But it doesn’t always work out. Many people get frustrated and abandon Personal Capital when they can’t connect something.
There’s no reason to aim for that kind of perfection!
You can always manually add an account and update it from time to time. Also, you can reach out to Personal Capital and ask them to look into your connection problem.
But it’s okay if you can’t link everything. The tool will STILL be useful.
Don’t Get too Addicted to Personal Capital
Having a full picture of your net worth is essential. But it’s unhealthy to look at Personal Capital every day.
Your investment and spending habits should be reviewed once a month so that you are adjusting and learning but not over-correcting.
Don’t download the Personal Capital app. You don’t need to check it all the time. Go live your life.
When to NOT Use Personal Capital?
Now that we know how to use Personal Capital, this Personal Capital review will end with when NOT to use the tool.
You know that Personal Capital is a net worth tracker. It’s meant to track your true wealth. Personal Capital, however, is NOT built to:
- Strictly control, monitor and reduce your expenses
- Track your rental or commercial real estate
- Actively monitor your stock trades
- Manage your bills or invoices
#1. Don’t Use It to Control a Tight Budget
Are you struggling to pay your bills from month to month?
This might sound harsh, but Personal Capital is NOT ideal for the poor struggling to pay bills
Personal Capital is a net worth tracker, and included in it is a cash flow tool that helps you identify
But if you are struggling to stay above the water, you aren’t going to care about the big picture. You’re freaked out about the small stuff. In this case, you need to create a budget.
If you are serious about creating a budget, read my guide How to Make a Budget that Works.
I also recommend a budgeting tool called YNAB (you need a budget). It’s not free but has a 30-day free trial. If you desperately need to control your spending, YNAB could change your life.
I also recommend a tool that actively helps you reduce expenses – Trim. It is an AI assistant that renegotiates late fees, subscriptions, and cable bills!
#2. Don’t Use Personal Capital to Track Your Real Estate Properties
Personal Capital assumes that you are a typical American who invests mostly in stocks and bonds, whether it’s inside a 401K or IRA, within Vanguard or a robo advisor like Betterment.
It also tracks your home values and mortgages. But if most of your investment money resides in real estate, then Personal Capital is not good.
Personal Capital does not do real-time pulls of mortgage balances or have the ability to identify bank line items as rental incomes or rental-specific mortgages.
Lots of people achieve early retirement through multiple real estate investments. For them, I recommend Quicken’s Home & Business.
Using Quicken, you can calculate property-level profits, send rent reminders, track leases and deposits, and even create tax reports.
#3. Don’t Use Personal Capital as Bill Reminders or Invoices
If you’re a freelancer or own a business and need to pay bills and collect invoices, then Personal Capital is not the place to do that.
Personal Capital tracks your net worth and helps you forecast retirement, but it doesn’t help you manage your finance.
I once again recommend Quicken to manage the ins and outs of your invoices and incomes, as well as your bills and payments.
#4. Personal Capital Can’t Track Individual Stocks & Cryptocurrencies
If most of your wealth resides in individual stocks and cryptocurrencies and you are really into trading them all the time, then Personal Capital is not the right tool for you.
Personal Capital is about setting you up for long-term growth toward retirement, not optimizing daily trades to you can get rick quickly.
While Personal Capital does show you daily gains and losses, you ought to ignore them because they are not useful and not always accurate.
It also does not pull real-time prices on stocks. And at the time of this writing, Personal Capital also doesn’t connect with cryptocurrency platforms such as Coinbase.
Personal Capital Review: Conclusion
There it is, my complete Personal Capital review and user guide on
I hope this Personal Capital review convinces you to give this life-transforming tool a try. It might just change the way you view wealth and coach you to win the game of early retirement.
It is entirely free and packed with five features that together will not only show you where you stand on your net worth but exactly how you can accelerate your path toward achieving financial freedom.
With Personal Capital, you get an accurate big-picture and lots of data and facts to make empowered, informed decisions for your life.
Ready to put your finances in order after reading this Personal Capital review? Sign up for the free Personal Capital financial tool today.
What’s Next?
Also considering Wealthfront as your robo advisor? Check out Betterment vs. Wealthfront: the Ultimate Review.
Scared for your stock investments and wondering when you should pull out? Read Will the Stock Market Crash? Complete Analysis
Want to explore more personal finance topics on Reddit? Check out my popular post, Reddit Personal Finance: Only the Best
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