I have been been using for over 2 years and I have to say I use it daily. The mobile app is fast to load and easily understandable. Having this quick access to all of my financial accounts make it easy. After having had-to replace several credit cards and having had someone apply for a personal loan in my name I decided to finally do something to decrease my vulnerability to scams and schemes. I good friend who is a cyber security expert recommended I implement a 3 tier plan. 1. Put a hold with all 3 credit agencies on releasing your credit scores. This then prevents thieves snooping to see if you have money and applying for loans in your name. 2. Sign up for a reputable password vault and use it. There several good ones. 3. Finally sign up for empower. It is free. They really are an investment company that wants you to use there services but provides this one stop view of your financial health and safety. Unlike Fisher investments who promised not to bug me when I signed up for some free literature bugged my secretary for weeks until she insisted I take the call and tell them to bug off. I have been contacted once by empowered. Quick sales pitch and when I explained investing was my hobby so no thanks she said it looks like I was doing it well and wished me luck. No further calls. That impressed me to the point that I recommended them to my wife in my “instructions for finances when I am demented or dead” note as she has 0 interest in investing.
Possibly the best personal finance app, but issues connecting Venmo.
Incredibly favorable dashboards and visualizations, better than any other for personally finance. I’m also a user of Mint (which is also good), and overall prefer Personal Capital. The investment allocation breakdowns are great, and intelligent recommendations are readily listed, though I wish that some better additional learning resources were immediately available within the app, tied to those intelligent recommended actions. One incredible service that the app provides is free fiduciary services for users with over $100k in financial holdings. That has been a very nice surprise, and makes me feel even more confident that Personal Capital is in the user’s corner—I would have expected more predatory non-fiduciary financial advisor services, or a fee for service. My only complaint is that Venmo constantly thinks that my account—which has been connected to the Personal Capital app, I believe through Plaid—is being hacked. I done have this issue with any of the other connected accounts I have with other financial institutions. It’s annoying, and paranoia inducing, but overall the app offers an incredible amount of value.
I read a lot of online reviews of financial software offerings before I found Personal Capital. I love that I can get a big picture overview of my net worth, determine if I’m saving enough for my child’s education, if I’m saving enough for retirement, and seeing an aggregate of all my investments in one place. Also, like that it tracks my spending so I know how I well I’m keeping to a budget each month. In the past, I’ve tried tracking my finances using iBank, but it didn’t update automatically very well and was a lot of work to maintain. Personal Capital automatically updates everything. A few drawbacks is not everything could be connected. For example, I couldn’t get my US Savings bonds to connect. I do like getting daily cash flow reports in my email. It allows me to easily confirm what I’ve spent on things before I’ve forgotten about them. Would definitely recommend this app and the desktop app as well. I ended up opening some accounts with Personal Capital/Empower after meeting with the investment advisor. So far earnings have been okay, but they appear to be on par with the economy at the moment. The meetings with the personal advisor have definitely been worthwhile and they provide very professional webinars on the current state of the economy as well.
Been using Personal Capital for over 5 years and it is very useful to be able to see your financial history at your fingertips. I have bought 2 homes and sold 1, been through market cycles, tracked retirement accounts and other financial accounts, and everything is there to see in the app and online. There is also other useful features like the retirement planner which allows you to get a good high level view of your retirement progress and add future events like home renovations or vehicle purchases, and asset allocation analysis and budget tracking. Really powerful financial tools! They started out not offering additional advisory services but eventually moved into that space. It is optional, but they are somewhat pushy trying to get you to speak with their advisors (which is a paid service!). They will cold call about 1-2x per month. Luckily you can opt out of the paid advisory service and just use the financial tracking with the app which is still a useful benefit. I am sure they also get a handle on your “data” to understand aggregate trends of their customers (and who knows what else??). In any case, overall a fairly useful service!
After 23 years of using Quicken, yesterday I said goodbye. Instead, after thorough online research, I signed up for the FREE Personal Capital service, which I can’t rate high enough for the ease with which I could add a large number of banking, investment and credit card accounts to my Personal Capital account, and the incredibly user-friendly interface and seamless aggregation of all of our financial accounts and data. The state of the art security features built-in to Personal Capital were the clincher for me. Quicken’s subscription model for a product that is buggy and has not kept up with the times (no viable IOS product offering, an inferior Quicken for Mac product, etc.) is no longer acceptable to me. I absolutely love the way it is so easy to keep completely up to date with our finances through the Personal Capital program, and how there is instantaneous syncing of the data in the desktop and IOS Personal Capital apps. While I will lose some functionality that was offered by my Quicken for Windows product, that is more than made up by the many advantages offered by Personal Capital. I highly recommend Personal Capital.
I was one of the first to take a leap of faith with this new company when it started in September, 2011. I have NOT been disappointed with their product and services. If you want a daily picture of your net worth, it can't be beat. If you want a daily picture of how your investment portfolio is doing on a real time basis, it can't be beat. If you want to talk, chat, email, video chat or text your advisor and get a very quick response, it can't be beat. If you want current news and helpful investment, retirement, and current financial news, it can't be beat. I have used and been abused by many brokers in the past. My age, 72. These pros look after my financial assets and during these last 12 months, with volatility, I am very happy with my goals being met. Their platform and diversification program has kept my financial boat "afloat and on course" to meet my long term retirement objectives. The retirement planner is very effective and easy to use. GREAT TOOL! And during these times of uncertainty, their fees have been worth it. And the "app"........can't do better than this! Thank you Personal Capital!
Overall there are some big positives to this app - it connects to my credit union and to my credit union’s mortgage agency. It is the ONLY app that is able to do this. The charts are useful, even if it makes for an overwhelming interface. On the downside, the interface is incredibly busy and the navigation is confusing. Also, the downloading of transactions is incredibly unreliable and slow, and PC does not seem to update more than once per day. Mint is much more reliable from a download perspective and updates as many times as I want. It is also a much cleaner interface, and transactions are much more understandable in the Mint app. Also, there are little annoyances that prevent me from fully allocating my accounts. For example, PC doesn’t recognize my mortgage account as a mortgage, but I can’t reclassify it through the app. Nor can I reclassify Betterment accounts as Savings - they always are Investments. UPDATE 02/22 - The ap loses another star because it does not recognize most of the mortgage companies and auto loan companies that I do business with. Their syncing service pales next to Mint and I refuse to spend a lot of time updating stuff manually. If I’m going to have to do manual updates, I might as well use Mint, where my accounts all work. Very disappointing.
I have tried numerous personal finance applications, and settled on Mint for the longest time; only because my financial institutions weren't available through those other apps. Then I heard about Personal Capital and thought I'd give it a try, and so far so great! It syncs with my credit unions which is rare, and MUCH appreciated. I can link my investment accounts and get professional advice. After using other apps, I have to say that they seem more geared towards children. Mint is a little more robust, but Personal Capital seems to have it all. It's made for us grown-ups, and gives you all the tools necessary to manage your finances and help improve your financial well being. Not to be understated, is the fact that they have apps for phones, tablets and desktop interfaces. Most other apps only offer phone apps which can be annoying to interface with unless you're just checking something quick while on the go. Mint does have all 3 as well, I just don't like their implementation of the interface as much and the tools they offer. Keep up the great work, and hopefully a year from now I'll still feel as good as I do now.
Great for net worth and retirement tracking. Not so much for budgeting.
Personal Capital is a fantastic investment tracking and total Net Worth tracking application. It’s extremely easy to use and helps to even show you how prepared you are for retirement even taking inflation into account based in a goal retirement date. I’ve heard about this app from multiple financial podcasts and tried it out. I immediately disconnected Mint from my accounts and deleted that app to use this. I still use EveryDollar for budgeting purposes though. To make this a 5 star app/program, I’d love the ability to budget out specific categories and I’d like to do away with the “smart categorization” of transactions. They’re often wrong and take more time to correct the category than it would be to simply categorize each transaction as it came in. It would also be nice to be able to exclude certain accounts from cash flow / budget calculations (such as 401(k) investments, HSA purchases or contributions, etc…) EveryDollar is still by far the best budgeting app I have ever used but personal capital is wonderful for everything else. I’m blown away by the features that are offered without a paid version.
Love the app! My main reason for writing this review is to provide suggestions to developers to make the app even better than it already is. I will change my rating to 5 stars once I know that my comments have been acknowledged by the developer. love how you can categorize each transaction to keep track of your spending as well as set a monthly budget. However, currently there is no way to set a monthly budget for certain spending categories (e.g. you can set a total monthly budget of $2,500, but you can’t set separate category budgets for rent, restaurants, groceries, shopping, auto/transportation, etc.) It would also be helpful to be able to add budgets on a year-by-year basis in addition to month by month. For example, you want to set a travel budget of $6,000 per year but it wouldn’t make sense to just add $500 dollars to your monthly budget because you do most of your traveling at certain times of the year. Also, sometimes the app misclassifies account credits as debits, not sure what’s going on there. Overall far superior app than most of the other ones out there!
This app used to be good. It was easy to link all my accounts, and they stayed updated without problems. In the last two years (especially after Empower took over), my experience has gone way downhill. Most of my accounts have had long-term problems staying linked now. The worst was Schwab (one of my largest accounts) which I couldn’t log into at all for months because PC kept taking me to a broken login page (Schwab worked fine on my other apps). Other accounts that are now broken for me include HealthEquity, Citi, Chase, and Venmo. I tried to “fix” them, and I even tried unlinking and re-linking. Now, Empower is using some terrible home brewed account linking interface that gets stuck on a loading screen forever. If I’m lucky enough to make it through to the account’s own login page, I’m able to login and grant permissions and it seems like all is well, but then I get stuck on a “if you’re not redirected back to the app, click here” page, and if I manually go back to the app, the account is not linked… Why can’t Empower just do account linking through Stripe like all its competitors do? I’m sad to leave this app, because it really used to be so good - and I still feel like there’s no other good replacement. But this app isn’t what it used to be.
This app provides a view of all of your finances across multiple accounts and platforms, tracks your spending, and has graphs and tools to see how your investments compare to different indices. It is a great tool to use to see your investment allocations across multiple accounts although it does not include ETFs into your allocations which is a big bummer as ETFs are becoming increasingly popular and can make up a large percentage of portfolios. The best feature of this app may be the retirement planner. It helps you to see potential outcomes associated with your spending, saving and investment habits and each scenario is customizable and savable so you can reference it later. My complaint is that the retirement planner could be even more customizable to allow more data points that could be adjusted for fluctuations over time rather than a single, non-fluctuating input. It would also be nice if there was an option to view potential outcomes based on a customizable return percentage rather than the current two options of mean and lowest 10%
Used the app daily for over 9 years. The app, when it works, provides useful insights into the totality of my finances. But that’s where it ends. Trouble tickets take months to resolved. And we aren’t talking about hole-in-the-wall credit unions. The app had had problems with vanguard, USAA, T. Rowe Price and others. I spend so much time tending to IT issues that the usefulness of the app is obviated. It’s faster and easier to just log into whatever financial institution I want to see and total up my money on a sheet of paper than to use this app. Once upon a time, the app worked well. But it’s quality has been degrading for some time. Like I said, it’s such a chore to manage that it’s not worth using. I feel like I’m going to work when I finally get the courage to face logging in and doing some work to correct the bugs and submit trouble tickets and take screenshots. Good grief; the app makes my life more difficult, not easier. And what good is the dashboard if half my accounts won’t update? This raises questions about the financial fee-based services they offer. If they can’t get the app right, do you really want to turn over control of your life savings to them, and pay for the privilege? Not a chance. Sorry Personal Capital. You had a good run. But you fell apart.
The key feature to app, the feature making it virtually indispensable, is it’s ability to aggregate financial data from multiple accounts. It is simply not possible to effectively manage your finances without seeing all your holdings - different banks, credit cards, and multiple brokerage firms - in one place. The truth is these data are already stored in the cloud; what this app does is automatically merge the data and provided a complete breakdown of the composite holdings, fees and risk. Many brokerage firms do similar analysis but only if you pay for it or have large sums of money on deposit. The interface is spectacular... but, there are a few features that could be improved. For example, the ability to set arbitrary targets for some holdings. Thus, if you are not interested in “alternative investments” you really need to ignore the advice provided. In short, the app would be better if it helped you achieve your your goals nots its goals. Still it is free. You will probably get some call trying to sell you services - but the caller are not overly aggressive. Bottom line. It’s a far better app than any brokerage firm provides today.
I chose a socially responsible portfolio approach which makes me feel better about this inheritance windfall I did not want to blow . I found other financial advisors are conflicted by their associatiions ( Insurance companies trying to sell me their annuities, double dipping brokers, my bank offering me retirement target mutual funds that had very high hiddens fees) loved Betterment interface too but the Personal Capital advisors are not just email accessible but will video conference , talk or email whenever you have questions. They have even helped my reallocate a Mish mash of securities into a more balanced portfolio to protect me from the market's volatility plus I got to divest of any gun, tobacco, fossil fuel, alcohol companies and yet show me the historical society that I can do just as well and feel good about myself chasing earnings. I am breathing freer with this transparent and organized new digital way of handling things. Give it a shot whether you only have $1000 in an account or property and retirement accounts to make last.
I used this app for a long time and suddenly it did not work. I tried logging in several ways and it simply did not recognise my account. I got frustrated and left a negative review. I was told to contact their customer support. They tried to help but nothing worked so I just forgot about it for several months (almost a year I would say) and I recently got an email saying that my account was going to be deactivated if I don’t log in soon. So I tried it again (because why not) and I was actually able to log in. I’m not sure if it was a glitch before or what but my information is still intact and it’s services are still there for me to use. I really love that the app shows you how much money you spend and where you spend it. And it compares your spending to precious months which is useful. I usually try to see if I can spend less money this month than last month which is often a challenge. If you are looking for an app that you can track where your money goes then this is a decent app for that. Besides the weird glitch, it works very well for my purpose.
Has good tools for my finance tracking and planning but has issues with accounts regularly. There are “red” issues which require reauth which is fine. It just means where I keep my money is more on the paranoid side. But the “yellow” issues are a real pain as you can’t do anything to try and resolve them short of re-linking them which causes you to lose history. One of my credit cards is managed directly on the same page as my savings and checking through that institutions website. I have even seen the account temporarily pop up inside the app and then disappear. PC refuses to fix it as they need a critical mass of requests before working on any particular issue. Had another card at a household company that was linked fine, then the issuer backing the credit sold their rights to another creditor. New website meant no more support from PC until reaching critical mass. Another household name institution has daily issues with balance recognition, and closing prices on the assets held in that account. I have worked application development in financial institutions for most of my career in commodity support. This kind of service would result in heads served on silver platters regularly... figuratively of course.
As a long-time (12’) user of Mint I never really looked elsewhere for a similar wealth management tool. After trying the intuit credit karma migration from mint shuttering it’s operation I quickly looked for alternatives as that product (and to some degree mint) was more geared towards budgeting mind sets vs wealth management. As an idovidual with diversified assets credit Karama was just too limiting. I didn’t want to pay for an finance aggregation tool so that brought me to mint and I quickly fell in love. There a few small things I wish the app did slightly different (collapse networth accounts!) but overall I am more in control of tags/categories and a much cleaner pro tire of my equities/401k positions and costs. I don’t mind getting solicited for the other services they provide and would much rather have that (and consider using them in fact) vs credit karma or mint focusing on credit scores, credit card signups etc. in other words of your looking for a solid networth
It’s nearly perfect, except for the budgeting aspect, which was actually the real reason I originally started trying out Empower. It does a fantastic job tracking almost all my accounts and lets me know if something isn’t syncing right away. It doesn’t play well with Apple/Goldman (though I haven’t tried recently, I just know it was a problem a few months ago), but since I only use ApplePay as linked to another credit card, it totally serves my needs. In terms of budgeting, while it does categorize transactions, and tracks those various categories, you can not set budget targets for categories, nor does it do the kind of envelope budgeting which allows for some categories to have spending be budgeted over longer or shorter periods. As it isn’t billed primarily as a budgeting tool, it is still a very good tool for aggregating all my financial accounts in one place and lets me quickly get transaction data into csv format where I can manually budget the way I want on a separate spreadsheet.
After consultation with a Financial Planner after I put together a budget on paper, I wanted a digital tool for managing all things financial in my life. After taking a few days to get familiar with navigating through all areas of the app, Personal Capital it is exactly what I needed in my life, as it has become very financially diverse within the last two months.. The User Interface is excellent. It functions to provide easy to understand yet detailed data points that track and compare current and previous income, expenses..Investment assets are also easily managed within the app. It accurately loads balances from several linked accounts (Credit Cards, banking, investment accounts, Robinhood) that are setup to require additional security authentication (passcodes). The graphs are well thought out and provide comparisons of spending and income from the previous month. This is an all around well developed financial app.
I never write any reviews, but this time I feel I need to say thank you to the developers of this app and for their online website. After years trying many other well-known budgeting and investing apps and services (YNAB, Intuit, etc) I found Personal Capital by chance and I was amazed by how much this solution offers for free. Connecting accounts (incl. 401k, HSA, mortgage, offshore accounts, etc) is super easy and the tool is really clever in categorizing your investment, income and expenses. The insights from the retirement and investment planner are really valuable. I am so impressed that I am considering opening an account and using their advisor services. As potential improvements, I would suggest the ability to further drill down into graphs and expense categories and better visualization and selection of income and expense categories and transactions. Overall amazing tool, potentially life changer for those interested in long-term financial planning. Highly recommended!
The positives of this app are very strong: excellent visualization of all of life’s many banking, investment, loan, and mortgage accounts. My wife and I have a range of accounts from different institutions, and we’ve been able to connect them all easily. This functionality alone makes this app A++ because it gives information and control over your personal finances. The downside is notable but with some advance notice, it’s less pervasive. PCap monetizes by selling you financial advising services. They’ll call, email, etc to sell these to you. The defense to this is simple: after the first call from them, I blocked their number on my phone. Their marketing emails go straight to my junk folder. If you want their financial advice or assistance, I’m sure they’re high quality, but I don’t have a need for it at this point and so I block out the marketing/sales overtures. Overall, a powerful tool for visualizing and tracking your personal financial health. Thanks, PCap!
Perfect for those with multiple accounts. I'm able to track everything in one place. I have my checking, savings, Roth IRA, betterment, E-Trade brokerage, employer Roth 401k, an old state pension account, and my credit cards and loans all in one easy to use interface. I love personal capital. I've been using it for 8 years now and with this app I'm able to way track my net worth. I started at a measly $10k between all my accounts and I've been able to increase exponentially since the start. I'm well above my first 100k and I bought a home. Of course, the bull market for the last several years helped, but having one platform where you can track your progress and actually see the impact of compound interest definitely helped me stay on track with my goals. The dream is for my accounts to look a lot like the screenshots in the app store. I'll keep you posted. 😉
I really, really love this tool. I have tried many other financial apps, but always stopped using them because I really need to be able to see the big picture. So, I just stuck to my custom spreadsheets — until personal capital. I love that I can look at cash flow and net worth, income and debt, all in one tool. My only feedback would be: the cash flow tool isn’t reliable, because my bank accounts regularly get logged out and need to be refreshed. It seems that there’s no way to get past banking data uploaded retroactively, and so I can’t actually use the tool reliably for my cash flow, even though it’s the best cash flow tool I’ve found yet. Would love to see that improved—maybe the ability to upload past data from CSV files? Also, re: savings goals: my big goal is to buy a house. Would love to see that as one of the options within the savings tracker!
I switched from Mint to Personal Capital about three years ago and I can not recommend it enough. There’s no advertisements for “pre-approved” credit cards they would help me “save even more.” The account linkages (automatic balance updates) work 98% of the time — with the rare exception being on of my wonkier student loans — which is a much higher success rate than I’ve experienced on other similar platforms. I’m not perfect about managing my budget, but being able to go in and edit the information (description and category tag) about each purchase from every account allows me to maintain a really good sense of where my money is going and the trends. I’ve linked my personal, small business, and daughter’s education accounts to Personal Capital and it’s been helpful to be able to see everything on one clean and intuitive dashboard — online (from anywhere), and on my iPad and iPhone.
We have used Personal Capital for several years and have been quite satisfied. Lately, the software has been duplicating expenses which makes any evaluation of one’s budget or retirement planning absolutely worthless. We have contacted Personal Capital over 10 times via email and phone. Personal Capital’s response is that our issue has been forwarded to their development team. It has now been months and we have never been contacted by the development team and the expense duplications continue to occur every month. We guess that maybe the software is recording the expense when it’s pending and then again when it posts as complete but since no one has ever contacted us, we are in the dark as to how to rectify the situation. We would recommend that all users closely monitor their expenses for duplicate charges. Our duplicate charges seem to be happening with our Costco Citi Visa cards…. Which we’re sure is happening to other clients. Too bad because otherwise we are fans of Personal Capital/Empower software.
I use this app because I have multiple retirement accounts I needed a place to consolidate the information. I'm a do it yourself investor so I do not use the personal capital advisors service and can't comment on them. However I can't comment on the tools for consolidation of multiple accounts. There is a good amount of data without being over or under whelmed regarding amounts in each account, returns overtime in each account or aggregate and allocation asset classes. I would give this five stars however I have about 10 retirement accounts, and at any given time one or more have an issue and are not able to sync. Normally this is an issue with the retirement count itself and not personal capital, however the feedback from personal capital via email is extremely slow and dismissive of these issues. If the accounts cannot be links successfully, this is a problem with fundamentals of the application and the rest of the application becomes worthless.
I was a Quicken user for over 20 years, When they went to a subscription service, and their mobile capabilities weren’t great, I started looking for an alternative for my tracking my personal finances, all in one place. I didn’t use the Quicken bill pay option, so all I really was looking for was something to keep track of my bank accounts, mortgage, credit cards, 401(k) and other investments. I researched online and found Personal Capital to be highly rated. For me, Personal Capital is exactly what I need. It brings in all of my bank accounts, investments, and even gives a Zestimate on my house and calculates the equity to build into my Net Worth. Took me a while to figure out how to get my Fidelity 401(k) to link, but through some Google searches, figured out that my company uses Fidelity Net Benefits site, so there you go. You can easily download files into csv, which is a nice feature. It has the ability to add expense and income categories, but you can’t make additions or changes to the register. That being said, I didn’t really make additions to the register in Quicken anyway as it pulled data from my banks and financial institutions. Mobile apps are great also. It works best on my iPad Pro, but still get info on my iPhone and regular iPad as well. Super easy to set up, great visualization and data. Great solution.
I used the Personal Capital free dashboard for years and am grateful for the terrific service it provided. There were issues now and then, but most were resolved by their helpful and competent support staff. Unfortunately, over the past two years, the quality has fallen dramatically. First, they couldn’t connect with my primary bank (PenFed Credit union) and acknowledge that as a permanent issue. Therefore, I couldn’t track much of our spending anymore (e.g., mortgage payments, marina fees, cash withdrawals). Second, about five accounts no longer update and don’t provide a way to “fix “ The account. Third, a major retirement account (TSP) won’t update the whole account but will update random component subaccounts. There’s a fourth I’m forgetting at the moment. It was great while it lasted, and I do appreciate Personal Capital providing such a useful tool for free for so long. I would have happily paid if I could still have had access to the old platform. It was genuinely a marvelous tool.
I have dropped my rating by one star because it is virtually impossible to read the detailed allocations on an iPhone in dark mode. I would’ve emailed the company, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to actually contact them other than leaving a review here. This app will provide an excellent analysis of your holdings and asset allocation. It makes recommendations for changes you can make to bring your actual holdings more in line with their recommended targets. It also enables you to compare your performance over time with what they recommend for your. They have an excellent retirement planner and investment checkup tool for more precise comparisons. One tweak that I would like to see is the ability to set some defaults. I would like to choose my opening screen, and performance comparisons and have those remain in place every time I open the app. Nevertheless, this is the very best investment app that I have seen, and I recommend it.
I have used Mint for a long time and it worked fine with a few syncing problem here and there but no big issues. Mint allows you to budget for various different things but really doesn't allow for projecting performance and retirement planning. Personal Capital does a great job syncing all of my accounts, in fact it handles the unique types of accounts very well, but the part that I am totally blown away with is the retirement planning calculator. You can project your desired age of retirement, how much you will contribute toward retirement each year, life expectancy, large expenses (like car, or college), income changes like social security or when mortgages on rental properties are paid off. Then you can play with the numbers and see how contributing more or spending less can impact your long term retirement plan. I love this app so far! Great job!
Over the past four years I have been reconstructing my financial foundation in preparation for starting my own businesses. Now I’m preparing for a baby, continuing my education, planning vacations, and buying properties. What does all of this have to do with this app? Well; everything listed above requires a solid understanding of how to build wealth. So on my hunt to find easier ways to maintain my portfolios and keep tract of my finances I came across nearly 20 different applications that say they were the most useful and easiest to use. After weeding down the lot I decided to try 10 of them out. (Granted I didn’t actively use all ten.) After exploring through these ten and removing the ones that didn’t quite have all that I have been looking for. Personal Capitalization definitely hit all the markers and then some. Having options I didn’t even know I wanted. So yes, out of 10. This one shined in excellence, though still there are ways to improve upon this application. More interactive graphing, financial planning could be more in depth, and the aesthetic could use some improvement. Also, perhaps add in contact availability for tax specialist and consultants. (For those Entrepreneurs/Investors looking to find more ways to save and grow their wealth.)
I’ve been using empower (personal capital) off and on for a couple years. I also used Mint at the same time. I love that Empower doesn’t have annoying ads and that it has an awesome retirement planner and additional investment information. Where it lacks, and where Mint does it better, is with credit score and manually added accounts, specifically vehicles. I would love to see Empower offer the option to track your credit score, as well as add assets such as cars that update their value based on KBB. Mint does this and it’s very nice to see without having to manually update values. Finally, Nationstar Mortgage is no longer available in Empower so my mortgage debt has to be manually updated as well. Overall, Empower is better for those who track investments along with their other finances. I prefer Empower, but will hang on to Mint for the credit score and aromatic updates of my vehicles and mortgage.
long-term account update failures & poor-service IT support
I’ve been using Personal Capital for many years, generally finding it to be worthwhile and helpful. But the app has sometimes been a bit unstable with account updates and IT support. Sadly, my experience with these issues is now at an all-time low. Specifically, Personal Capital hasn’t been able to update my 401k account—the most important reason I use the app—since late-July. Worse, their IT support hasn’t been able to help. Instead, I’ve just gone around in circles with their support representatives, getting the same default troubleshooting steps that haven’t been able to resolve the update-failures. I sadly speculate that Personal Capital is using a third-party vendor that is disincentivized to escalate long-term, unresolved issues to Personal Capital’s management. So the app is simply no longer a reliable way to track my 401k; instead, I’m turning back to my investment account’s website directly. Hopefully Personal Capital’s leadership team will start to take its apps’ update failures & poor IT support issues seriously.
Update 10/22. No longer crashing. For months. Seems even more stable since Empower acquisition. Also updates all my accounts now regularly. Would get 5 stars if I could have more than 30 income/expense categories Update December 23. Still crashes on iPadOS; always when selecting any date range except current or last month in cash flow, and anything other than current month in Budgeting. Other reviews here also state crashing problems with iPadOS. Will give 5 stars when fixed. Once I updated my iPad to iPadOS, I haven’t been able to get into Personal Capital. I have been a power user for many years and have been very happy with it. It’s now been 3 weeks since I’ve been able to use it. I’m about to explore other options. Update. Since acquisition by Empower, app is much more stable and reliable. Issues are addressed quickly. Back to 5 stars.
App keeps crashing after iPadOS and app latest update.
I have been using Personal Capital for several months and I never had any problem until I updated to iPadOS. I loved the application and it’s features. I already updated the app to the latest version and because it kept crashing re-installed it a couple of times. iPadOS was also updated to the latest version. Edited: After several uninstall/reinstall and removing my iPad from authorized devices in my account and disabling Touch ID, I got the app working for a couple of weeks. Three days ago the app started crashing again after an iPadOS update. The app minimizes when loading the account data and you have to repeat the login process again and it keeps crashing. This time, all the reinstall process has not worked. Unsuccessfully tried to contact support through the web site since I cannot do it using the app. I could not find how to submit a support request. The option must be buried some where not to be found. I think the app is not optimized for iPadOS and need to be fixed.
This app would be worthy of 5 stars if only it would accommodate splitting transactions to multiple categories. Think about it, when an investment holding is sold multiple things should be happening. Clear the original cost of the investment, record gain or loss on the sale, and record fees associated with the transaction. Since Personal Capital is an investment based app, you’d think this would be common sense. Also, mortgage payments involve payment of principal, interest, and escrow related expenses. A simple category of “mortgage pymt” doesn’t provide a good picture of what is truly happening. Please consider adding this feature soon! Updated: You may be losing me to Mint. Downloaded their app today, and am giving it a go. So far I’m impressed with the ease of setup and ability to edit and SPLIT transactions. To be honest your app is nothing but a place to see all of your balances.....you can’t do anything with it. Mint allows for transaction entry (including splits), bill pay and more. Plus you can see all your balances in one place.
Can’t get my money out. Have paid thousands in fees to try to get my money. I paid $3000 plus to have them send a bank check and they sent me a check made out to someone else and for far less than what it was supposed to be. They said I’d have to pay all that again even though it was their screw up. Then months later tried again I paid the fees and they sent it to the wrong address again their screw up and again said I’d have to pay all the fees again. This place is absolutely horrible and unwilling to fix mistakes they make . I would never recommend them . I’m still trying to get my money after months and months !!! They keep saying this is the last fee then there’s another so I pay that and oh wait there’s another and another. All I want is to have my money. I have asked them to start a grievance and they said they did . They kept saying it’s not completed yet now they’re telling me it won’t be done until I get my money out of there but they won’t give me my money . I just wish they would stand behind their word.
This is an amazing app and one I’ve been using off and on for several years now. Dashboards are helpful, articles and blogs are spot on, but there is one HUGE GLARING issue with Empower’s app and many other financial institution apps…that is the lack of a safe and secure method of MFA (Multi Factor Authentication). Empower does have MFA but their methods are archaic and not very safe and secure. Empower and financial institutions love to boast how they use the latest methods of encryption, yet use SMS texting or email to send MFA codes. These methods have been proven over and over again to be far from secure and attackers are able to capture them since they are sent through non-encrypted channels. A change needs to happen in the financial sector in order to keep our data as safe as possible. Claiming to use 256bit encryption is fine when logging in to their sites, but to use SMS texting or email for MFA is abysmal and a lazy way to use MFA. Most sites and services on the web allow you to use DUO or Google Authenticator for MFA, so why aren’t the financial institutions doing the same?!?!?
This has to be one of my favorite financial apps in my phone. It’s a great way to be able to keep track of your net worth involving bank account information along with credit cards, loans, stock portfolios, 401(k)s and IRA etc. One thing I would like to see added to this app is a feature that allows you to add in a amount of precious metals that will then follow trend of the precious metals so you’ll know what your net worth is with those metals included. So if you own 1 ounce of gold etc. and you put in the system that you have 1 ounce of gold etc. as precious metal moves up or down you’ll see it add with your net worth as well. I think this would be an awesome feature that would oh wow those are in first in the precious metals to keep track of their waited amount and put this app ahead of a lot of the other apps that track net worth.
I was looking for a Mint replacement since it is closing and I was already using Empower for Net Worth information so I decided to give them a shot. One thing I noticed that I couldn’t do is change the category of transactions while they are still pending. Another thing is that there is no button to push to refresh my accounts if they aren’t automatically refreshing when I sign in. They were showing up not updated for days at one point and I had no way to refresh them. Those are the major things I would like that I do not have. I also do not understand why I can edit the category names but not delete them. So I just have to find one that exists and change it instead of being able to just develop my own list. I’ve only just started using it regularly so I will update if there are other items I find.
I really love this app. Just truly a great way to get an overview of your whole financial picture from a birds eye view. Well designed, it’s easy to see the basic information of your accounts all together. Even better, it’s just as easy to get the detailed info of each account if you want that too, afterwards. I honestly often learn about activity in my various banking, credit card, and investment accounts that is unknown to me from going directly to their own websites. This is due to the excellent and user friendly design of the personal capital app and website - which is often more intuitive and easy to access than my various banks own website designs. Totally worth it if you want a one-stop way to keep tabs on all your finances - and who doesn’t want to do that?!
A good start — but with some significant limitations
Overall I am pleased with Personal Capital, and there are many powerful and useful features. But the utility of these features (not just on the app , but also on the full website) is diminished by the inability of Personal Capital to fully interface and access my accounts in TIAA CREF. It had been working fine until I (along with all of my fellow employees) opened a self-directed brokerage account (SDBA) with my retirement account because my employer “streamlined” the allocation options in our 403b and 401a accounts. Now, PC lists the total $ amount but does not “see” the allocations or tickers any of the mutual funds that are in the SDBA, even though TIAA website lists all of them and tracks their allocations for me (and none of them are obscure or little-known mutual funds by any means). That has been frustrating. I sure hope that PC will fix this problem soon, otherwise I cannot even monitor about 20% of my entire portfolio and all of the retirement calculators and allocation determinations are moot.
We had used Quicken since the 90’s to manage our finances and investments, maintaining the software with an upgrade every 2-3 years. But once Quicken went to their subscription business model, it was time to find something better. In reality there isn’t significant incremental value in money management software such as Quicken every year anyway. So we evaluated Personal Capital and adopted it completely. What a great software package- and much easier to use and comprehensive for our needs than Quicken! We had become too entrenched with Quicken to even realize how much time we were unnecessarily spending with Quicken to manage our finances BUT Personal Capital really opened our eyes and greatly reduced the effort needed. We would never go back to Quicken even if they paid us to use it 😉
I want to like this app but it is not user friendly or easy to personalize. The problem is managing external accounts. To the developers: Download the NerdWallet app and play with their account linking and management process then duplicate it. I have a HELOC through my bank and while the app is able to pull all my other accounts through the same bank login, it isn’t connecting to that one which is messing with my net worth. I know this isn’t a problem on my bank’s end because I’ve connected with other apps seamlessly. The reason I want to use this app is for the seemingly powerful portfolio analytics tools. Unfortunately, I can’t use them when the accounts in my portfolio aren’t visible or linking properly. There isn’t even an option to manually add a liability or asset. For now, I’m deleting this app and hunting for another. I hope this app gets more streamlined especially since it’s mentioned in a finance book targeted at tech savvy young professionals.
For all the money one could spend on software and programs, Personal Capital is an amazing tool FOR FREE. I’ve ran trials with multiple programs (moneywiz, ynab, every dollar, and tiller) and Personal Capital has worked the best for me. It syncs to almost every account I track, even my state pension (which is a phenomenal benefit because PC tracks it better than the host website does). It is very user friendly. It does take some time to optimize the cash flow/income/expense/transfer features of PC (especially if you have multiple cash accounts) because you have to vigilantly track your transactions and appropriately label them until PC’s algorithm picks up on the patterns. At this point, it becomes a truly phenomenal tool. I recommend to any and everybody willing to listen or seeking budgeting/net worth tracking.
I used Microsoft Money in the early days, then switched to Quicken, then when the IoT came, I switched to Mint and then again to Personal Capital for a few years now. I think it’s one of the best out there and definitely gives a good overview of my financial health. The biggest issue however, is not the app itself, but the sales. Don’t forget they can see your portfolio as well. If your are a good fish, they will try to get you sign up with their service and charge a hefty monthly fee. I fall for that because I was too busy to manage my own portfolio. When you try to get out, they will say how good they outperform your other portfolios..., etc. You will have to prepare to explain yourself in order to get your funds transfer elsewhere. Also, I would not trust my money with recent college grads who doesn’t yet understand what money means to their clients. As a CPA, I trust myself more.
Re: 3 Months in. Just wishing they added custom reminders to update your expense categories. So I could choose for every 3 days to get a notification and correct vending machine to my custom “work snacks” section. And also!!! Being able o split up an expense across multiple categories. Like when I go to the gas station and put 20$ on pump so and so. And buy a Red Bull, some candy, and some chips for work. I want to be able to split that 20 into gas and then the rest into “work snacks” along with the things I get from the vending machine after I sort it. Got it today. Nice being able to have all accounts in one place in a really well built app that I feel as if I can trust with my secure information. The Touch ID implementation along with Siri being able to read off balances is amazing. Waiting for Robinhood to connect. Then all my money will be shown in here minus bitcoin. Lol.
Used to be helpful for comparing investments to the S&P 500 index, you know, the index that covers about 80% of the equity market, the same index that others use as the best indicator of the market. I’m not sure what better benchmark there is to compare your investments too except maybe a total stock market index but of the 3 used all the time (Dow, S&P 500, NASDAQ) its the broadest. Instead Personal Capital now offers their own “blended” option, as well as “foreign stocks” and “bond”. S&P 500 is gone so you can’t even compare your performance relative to the S&P 500 and their recommend proprietary “blended” option to see how their recommendation compares to the S&P. And no one knows exactly what’s in their “recommended” blend except that it’s sector based. Looks like they’ve lost transparency here and I wonder why they appear to be hiding something. I was considering using their cash option but now I’m considering removing all my accounts because they appear motivated to prevent a healthy comparison with standard index performance measures.
First of all, the ability to track all of you personal accounts into one aggregator is extremely helpful. The Empowerment app is one of the best you can use, but it does have a tendency to have troubles staying linked to some accounts. Their snapshot of you accounts are top notch. The problem I have with Empowerment and when it was Personal Capital is that some of their employees can see your accounts and balances. I get calls all of the time from of their advisors wanted to do a personal financial checkup, and they reference the accounts I have and my net worth. This is concerning and something everyone should be aware of when signing up for this service. I do not think other financial aggregators allow their employees to see this level of personal detail. I keeping thinking of deleting my account because of their employees have access to a lot of information, but their ability to link all of accounts together is so valuable.
