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I love Personal Captial and have been using it since June 2014! It easily compiles all of my accounts into one easy-to-view page. I can see my total assets and liabilities that contribute to my overall net worth. With one login, I can get a full view of my finances.

Dashboard

The screenshot from Personal Capital’s website shows the exact same view that I see when I log into my account. Along the left sidebar, I see my calculated net worth and all of my accounts broken up into cash accounts (checking and savings), investment accounts (brokerage, IRAs, 401k, etc.), and credit accounts (credit cards, mortgages, other loans).

This screenshot doesn’t show that there is also a section for “other assets”. For example, I can enter the address of my house and Personal Capital will automatically pull the Zillow estimate and add it to my assets total. If I don’t like Zillow’s estimate, I can always enter in a value I think is more accurate.

The left sidebar information is, in my opinion, the best part of the entire Personal Capital website. Having all of my accounts located in one place for me to view makes it simple to compare balances and transactions as well as trends for budgeting and investments.

In the middle of the page, the dashboard also shows a graph of my net worth over time and my current spending for the month broken down into my custom-made budget, income, and expenses.

A little lower down the page shows my investment portfolio balance in a graph over time as well as my cash reserves over that same period of time. Overall, there is a ton of information on this page that is a great snapshot of my financial picture.

Along the top of the webpage, there are Personal Capital breaks down your financial picture into Banking, Investing, and Planning.

Banking

While I think everyone should start by manually tracking their transactions in a spreadsheet created by themselves before using this automated feature, the cash flow dropdown in this section is my go-to section for getting a clear picture of my monthly transactions.

Before I started with Personal Capital, I created an excel spreadsheet and categorized each transaction down to the penny. While this was very tedious, it gave me the best understanding of how much things cost and how quickly expenses can pile up.

The cash flow section shows the income minus expenses in an easy-to-view graph over a specified date range of your choosing. You can filter each account to make it easy to find out how much you are spending on one account versus the other. This makes budgeting super easy but I wouldn’t have appreciated this automation if I hadn’t spent all those years counting pennies.

There are also dropdowns for creating a formal budget within the website as well as keeping track of your bills. I don’t really use those pages since I have all my bills automated and keep track of my monthly cash flow to know if I am sticking to my budget.

Investing

As you might have found in other Personal Capital reviews, the website is most known for its tools around your portfolio and investments. Holdings, Balances, Performance, Allocation, and US Sectors are all of the different options you can choose from to get the information you are looking for with regards to your investments.

I tend to look more at the Holdings and Performance webpages because they give me the best information about how my accounts are performing. To me, these two pages are very similar, except that the Holdings page allows me to filter the performance for each stock or fund that I have in all of my accounts. The Performance webpage only allows me to filter by account.

With both the Holdings and the Performance webpages, you can compare the percent returns of your holdings and accounts with that of different indexes like the S&P 500. I really like how simple this view is and how I can directly compare a new investment I have made with the market over a specific time period.

Planning and Other Insights

The Planning dropdown allows you to entire in life milestone information and have the website run Monte Carlo simulations to see if you are investing/saving enough to meet your retirement goals. There is also a retirement fee analyzer to see if you are paying too much in fees.

While these features are extensive, I do not really use them or put too much “stock” into their results. (See what I did there 😉 ) To me, there are so many factors that can and will change my personal financial picture, that I cannot take these simulations seriously.

I have been using Personal Capital for so long that I can see myself working with any other accounts aggregator. I did try Mint for a little bit to compare it with Personal Capital. While they both provide similar information about your financial status, I found Mint to be more “selly”.

They had ads within the different webpages and that made me feel like the tool wasn’t working for me but selling ads to make itself money. Personal Capital doesn’t have any ads but they do have financial advisors that will occasionally call you to sell you their services. While this is slightly annoying, I do understand that they have to do outreach to attract customers to their financial services.

If you can get past the occasional phone calls, I think you will really like using Personal Capital as your financial accounts aggregator. I have no doubts that the website is secure. Before I entered in all my information, I called and actually talked to someone on the phone who reassured me of their cybersecurity.

Their mobile app is quite good as well. While it does not have all of the same features as their desktop website, the app works for a quick look at your accounts and net worth. The mobile app really excels if you need to quickly search for a transaction when you’re out.

Overall, if you click here, you will be signing up for a free, easy-to-use, financial aggregator to inform you of your current financial picture.