Personal Capital

The first stop in my new approach to investment was a website called Personal Capital. This is a financial adviser firm that offers some very nice online software. To use their free service, you create an account and enter all of your financial account information (including log on information and passwords). After your account is created, you are able to access all of your financial information and retrieve balances and recent transactions through their Personal Capital website

Personal Capital makes money by becoming financial advisers to some of the people who sign up for the free site. They contacted me and I had a couple of video conversations with one of their advisers. The presentation was quite good. They analyzed my investments and made some general recommendations. They recommended that I set up a financial account with them and move some of my money there to allow them to manage the investments. They would allocate these funds over domestic and international stocks and bonds. They use ETF’s for most of these, but mix in some individual stocks. This is pretty much the way I have and will continue to invest.

They do charge a fee for these management services. In my case it would be about 0.9% of the balance annually. That’s typical for human financial advisers. In my case, this fee is too high because I’m more than happy to manage my own investments. As a result, I won’t be using their advisory services, but I will continue to use the free site.

However, I did some analysis on the data in their presentation. My conclusion was that they would have done a better job in the past with my investments than I did. As a result, I recommend that people with significant funds who are willing to pay someone else to manage their investments consider this service.

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