Nathan B.
Major fail in both investment strategy and service
Signed-up with Personal Capital as an experiment to test their investment strategy vs. my simple index fund strategy. Their advisor was very engaging throughout the initial stages helping me to develop a strategy that fit my needs. I was convinced enough to give them a substantial amount to manage. Ran the experiment for 11 months. They outperformed the index funds by less than 1% and with their fees they underperformed by 1.64%. So I decided to close the account and go back to my prior strategy. That's when the pain started... Personal Capital manages the money, but they will transfer you money to Pershing while they are managing it. When you open your account with Personal Capital they are very helpful in moving the money over to Pershing. However when you close your account they are not at all helpful in moving it back to where you previously had it (in my case ETrade). It took me hours of phone calls with Pershing to sort it all out and get the money moved back. In the process the unmanaged accounts lost $40K in value. Also, when Pershing moved the accounts back to ETrade they didn't liquidate first, they moved over all the securities as is - meaning I then had to manually sell 50+ equities in ETrade - all the while struggling to understand if all the value I was expecting was transferred back. Turns out this transfer doesn't happen all at once, but through a series of transactions over a couple of months. Fast forward 4 months after closing the Personal Capital accounts. I am still wondering where $40K went and get zero help from Personal Capital and very little from Pershing. Rated 2 stars because they do actively manage your money and will execute a fairly complex strategy for you that would be extremely labor intensive for you to operate on your own. That part of the value prop is true. But the fees are still heavy and their service (once they have your money) is terrible. I would not trust Personal Capital with my money again.