Personal CapitalReviews of personalcapital.com

It's actually very nice, when it works. Some people have luck using TotalView in Fidelity, to me PersonalCapital lets you see your investments much better, you can see performance, what did it today, a month, year ago. Problem is as many people highlighted with tech support. Or complete lack of it. I now reached a state when things are fine on my phone, and nothing works via web site. The only response I get is - try again. I only use it as dashboard, cannot even imagine using it for real investment.

Personal Capital, now Empowerment is no longer the responsive company I am use to working with. Their dashboard and financial planning has been accurate and very informative. When there are issues, their support got things resolved within 2-3 weeks, sometimes the next day. Now, things have changed, support lacks responsiveness and cannot give ETAs on fixes.IT is not exact science however it raises the question of the capabilities of their personnel to get things fixed. Something has to change.

Just started. Not yet. Very disappointed I can't manually enter transactions and have them then match up with downloaded/uploaded transactions from online accounts for a more accurate up to the minute and penny accuracy.

The Personal Capital desktop app is very capable; but their support is nearly useless. They do not provide a phone number to call. They do not have a chat feature. They provide a feature that allows the user to describe the problem. The response is that someone will respond soon. The response is a canned email. That is not helpful. I am looking for an alternate application.

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.

Note: I see many people rating their free services. I am rating their financial advisor services. It was a great company until they were purchased. After that, the company turned south quickly. They sold their expensive 0.89% service rate as beating index by 1% with their superior diversification strategy. Under-performed by 1% so would have been better off in a robo-account. Used to have great advisors, but then turnover accelerated. When I left, advisors weren't even responding to emails. Also, the dashboard consistently had problems that were never addressed.

Support is reason for low rating. I admit I have not explored all the capabilities, but the early inability of my account from USAA to sync properly and the lack of any action to resolve, means I can't ever get a picture of my account. Only when I ask about status of resolution, do they respond with "we are investigating". Issue was present 5 months ago. I notified them of the issue 2 months ago. No resolution and no correspondence or status. USAA is not a small institution, and USAA is known as a remote access friendly company. So keep this in mind, that if issue does arise, you may not get adequate support.

I signed up for a free consultation with an advisor in June when they were offering $200 to do so. Talked to an advisor 3 times. I was considering investing some money, but have lost trust. It is Mid October and never got the $200. Had emailed them and got a generic response. I do like the free tools and found the financial advisor to be friendly and not pushy.