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Personal Capital Review: What’s Good and What to Watch Out For

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personal capital review Most of us are familiar with the idea that there is no free lunch – but tech companies are very, very good at convincing us that this is not the case. If you’ve seen the news lately, you may have noticed that Facebook & Google have been in hot water because of the controversial use of their data. I don’t want to put Personal Capital in the same category, but don’t think for a second that they create and maintain all of their neat tools as a gesture of goodwill. Wondering how Personal Capital works and if it’s worth the cost? Here’s our review.

Personal Capital Review: How Does it Work?

Personal Capital’s crown jewel is an account aggregation system – a very unsexy term for something that actually does a bunch of really cool things. Essentially, you hook up all of your financial accounts – think credit cards, checking, investments, 401k from work, even your house! Personal Capital automatically crunches that data for you and lets you everything from what your total net worth is to your potential capital gains tax exposure. It’s like a financial Oracle – you after you’ve fed it your personal data, you can pretty much ask it any question you want to.

Here’s the thing – You aren’t the only one asking! Personal Capital anonymizes its data, so no one else is looking at your actual account numbers, but what they are looking at is how much you have, where you have it, and if Personal Capital can manage it. Personal Capital is actually a Registered Investment Advisor, which is a type of investment company that manages assets on a fiduciary basis (in your best interest).

This puts them ahead of traditional wealth management companies like Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, but they like to sell themselves as being a FinTech company. In reality, their core business is much more similar to that of Fisher Investments, a traditional hard selling RIA firm.  A lot of Personal Capital’s senior management team came from Fisher, so it should not shock you that their company culture is similar.

The Good

  • .89% is a low price to pay for true fiduciary wealth management
  • Personal Capital uses low-cost ETFs and efficient investment vehicles

The OK

  • The amazing set of free tools is counterbalanced by the fact that all of that info is going to Personal Capital – you are a lead in their system

The Not So Good

  • The advice given is highly dependant on who you talk to
  • The financial advisors receive compensation primarily for getting new assets onto the books, not keeping existing clients happy
  • If you don’t take advantage of or don’t want the financial planning aspect, you are paying .89% for no reason
  • Vanguard has a similar experience for only .3% at higher account balances

What You Need to Know about Personal Capital

Personal Capital currently has about $8 Billion of assets under management, which is certainly more money than you or I have, but tiny compared the other giants in the investment space. What they do have, however, is over $674 billion of tracked assets via their app – assets that they’d like to get on their own platform and charge .89% to manage. Because of this, its shiny free to use tools come with a cost. Buried in the fine print which I’m sure you didn’t read is a clause that allows Personal Capital to solicit you for advisory services.

If you have more than $100,000 in financial assets linked to the platform, you’d better expect a call from Personal Capital. You can always block their number or give them a fake phone number when you sign up, but that’s not very nice, is it? Those financial advisors from Personal Capital will be calling to try and get you invested in one of the three options below, depending on how much you have.

Personal Capital operates on a 3 tiered investment plan system – but unless you’ve got over a million dollars or more to invest, there’s no guarantee you’ll talk to a Certified Financial Planner. In a world where there are over 80,000 CFPs, there’s no reason to settle for anything less. It’s important to note that Personal Capital is not a robo advisor. While the advisors will attempt to put you in a managed asset program that may trade on certain automatic triggers, there are humans involved in all investment decisions.

In fact, once you get over $200,000, they will stop investing you in an all ETF strategy and move you into a basket of individual stocks that will act like an index – which can have several advantages.  The ability to tax loss harvest at the individual stock level can increase real returns and should not be discounted. In addition, they offer full financial planning for free (which in my opinion they should position much more strongly).

Is It Worth the Fee?

The truth is that these days you can get an efficient investment allocation for pennies. If you choose the three fund portfolio, the cost for that allocation is something like .05% (the average weighted expense ratio of the funds). If you wanted to dial up the sophistication a bit, you could go to a robo advisor like Wealthfront and pay .25% (plus the expense ratio of the underlying funds) for a portfolio that trades automatically and can also tax loss harvest at the stock level – so why pay .89% for any of Personal Capital’s offerings?

Here’s the key difference – at Personal Capital you are (horror stories notwithstanding) not paying just for the investment management. Personal Capital is not a robo advisor – they even made a whole video explaining they are not a robo:

Now I tend to agree with them that one of the worst deals in finance is investing with a robo advisor. They are charging you a lot for taking a quiz once – and unlike a human advisor, no one’s there to talk you out of buying a bitcoin at $20,000 or letting you know how many years retirement you’ll postpone by if you go ahead and buy the house with the chef’s kitchen. Humans cost more than any robo (though with Vanguard’s Personal Advisor Services, not much more) but the value you get back from them is measurably higher because they serve as a wall between you and your worst impulses.

In addition to the above, a good human advisor can provide counsel to make sure that assets are correctly titled, can advise on trusts and wills, help you open a Donor Advised Fund to give to charities, review your tax return and more. Robo-advisors can only invest the money you’ve given them.

At Personal Capital they claim to offer you a ‘team’ of financial advisors at $100k, two financial advisors at $200k, and access to a Certified Financial Planner once you’ve accumulated a more than a million dollars with them. Because Personal Capital pays its financial advisors mostly for converting assets from off platform to assets under management – every minute their advisors spend talking to current clients is a minute they can’t use to convince potential new clients to join Prospect Capital. Most of these advisors are really just looking to gather up any of your assets that aren’t yet managed – providing them with additional fees and charging you more.

What About Vanguard’s Personal Advisor Services?

Most people know Vanguard as a go-to asset manager of choice for inexpensive, passively managed index ETFs and Mutual Funds. They currently have over $5 Trillion of assets under management – over $1 Trillion of which their discount brokerage account now holds.

Vanguard has taken a similar approach as Personal Capital, using this $1 trillion as a base to source clients for its own managed services program, called Vanguard Personal Advisor Services. There are a couple of key differences. Vanguard’s PAS is closer to a true robo advisor until you get to $500,000 – where you can get a CFP to do one time planning for free. At $1 million under management, you get a dedicated CFP for free.

So What Should You Do?

If you’ve got a million dollars or more, Vanguard seems like the no-brainer option to get a Certified Financial Planner (if you are ok with a call center delivering advice). If you have less than that or want a more experienced CFP focused on building a long-term relationship, try one of the many independent RIA firms out there that will treat you as a client and not a number.

You may pay more, but having a long, lasting relationship with someone who intimately knows your situation easily pays for itself when you need to make big life-changing financial decisions. If you just want investment management from a robo-advisor and to keep the pesky humans away, Schwab and WiseBanyan both offer a 0% fee algorithmic solution (though you will pay a small fee from the ETF expense ratios) – so you might as well skip robo advisors charging any price at this point.

Personal Capital is an underwhelming choice in any of these slots, so unless you really value the tools they offer, it is generally best to take your money elsewhere.

Author Info: Michael V. Spelman is a Certified Financial Planner, and co-owner of Myrmidon Private Capital, an RIA specializing in retirement planning.  He’s also president at The GUL Guy, a specialty life insurance comparison agency.

Stock Market 101: Basics of Investing

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Sometimes I hear people tell me that the stock market is like magic. That’s not the case at all.

Making money in the stock market does not have to be an impossible or difficult feat. Perhaps the biggest obstacle when it comes to investing is making sure time is on your side. Time is maybe the most important factor in investing for two reasons:

– there is longer for your money to compound

– you can make mistakes and learn the basics through trial and error

By reading some of the tips below on how to succeed in the stock market, you should be well on your way to starting an investment portfolio in stocks.

History proves that with time on your side, you can count on the history of the market to know that your investments will pay off. It is a well-known fact that in the long term, stocks have historically outperformed all other types of investments. Over long periods of time, that stock market has averaged around 10 percent.

What About Over Shorter Time Frames?

Quite to the contrary, stock performance over the short term is a much riskier. There are countless examples in history where stocks have plummeted in a single day.  When it comes to stocks, timing the market or day-trading is a skill that takes a lot of time and knowledge, and still is a dangerous pursuit. All in all, stock investments should only be relied on as long term investments unless you want to risk your savings. If so, I’d still recommend a day at the casino over the stock market. You’ll probably lose all of your money there, too, but you’ll certainly have more fun!

Risk/Reward

It’s true that as you increase your risk, you have a greater chance for a nice reward at the end of the rainbow. This is certainly the case when it comes to stocks. To take more risk, focus on sectors that historically have seen more volatility, such as real estate. If you’re hoping to lower your risk while investing, do your due diligence and never invest in something that you have not researched completely. Most investors have problems when they “take a flyer” or “trust their gut.” These are horrible ways to invest.

How To Pick Long Term Winners

Nothing is a better predictor of stock price appreciation over the long term than earnings. Companies with solid earnings sometimes can outspend their profits, but usually if you focus on earnings, you’re headed toward winning companies. When it comes to valuing a stock or determining how risky it is, looking at the historical data on earnings to discover risky or potentially successful the investment will be to you. The company earns little money but shows a profit? That company is downsizing and showing profits through cutting. You can’t do that forever. One huge quarter for earnings? You should ask yourself how the company can duplicate that feat in the future. You can learn a ton from earnings.

While earnings is a great place to start as you’re getting your feet wet, it’s definitely not the only indicator. Remember the whole “Time on your side so you can learn” speech above? This is meant to point you in the right direction. People spend years perfecting their knowledge of more advanced concepts such as price to book and price to earnings ratios.

Stocks Vs. Bonds

When comparing a bad day for a stock to a bad day for a bond, the differences are significant. Bonds tend to bounce back from a bad day much more quickly than a stock would. Historical data shows that a small dip in a stock’s price versus a bond’s price can mean entirely different long term results. A bond may bounce back quickly while a stock may take more than five years to recover. While bonds will rebound (or the company will go bankrupt), you never know with a stock.

Another good indicator for both the performance of stocks and bonds comes with a look at what interest rates are doing. When interest rates go up, bond prices fall. On the other hand, when interest rates fall, bond prices go up. Similar trends occur with stocks. Knowing these patterns can help you determine when a good time to buy or sell would be. While it is never a good idea to time the market without significant experience in investing, it is wise to know what the economy is doing. In general, the success of your investments will follow the success of the economy.

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Five Money-Saving Tasks That’ll Help You Cha-Ching! in the 4th Quarter

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I love the sound of the cash register ringing, don’t you?

If you’re going to be successful in your financial life, treat it as if it’s a business and you’re trying to hear that awesome cash register sound. If you don’t, you’ll always prioritize yourself behind more “important” activities like your job (nevermind that the job is there to help your net worth…that’s probably the subject of another post).

Every business has a mandatory list of activities that can’t be ignored. So does your financial life.

Here are five items that MUST be on that list this quarter:

1) Mutual fund capital gains. Even if you don’t have mutual funds outside of an IRA now, you should learn how these rules work. When the manager (or system, for an index fund) trades stocks or bonds inside of the fund a capital gain is generated. Someone has to pay it, and there’s no real fair method, so the mutual fund company declares a date and divides the gain among shareholders of record. Even if you didn’t sell the fund, you’re responsible for your portion of the manager’s buying and selling.

With results so far in 2012 looking up, there’s a good chance you might get hit with a tax bill this year. Avoiding this tax is legal and easy. Find the dates the fund declares capital gains and transfer your money to a different fund in the same family. This avoids fees for switching and the manager’s capital gains tax.

Grab a calculator before you move any money. You’ll still be on the hook for capital gains taxes you generate by selling as well. The cost of switching might outweigh the savings you’ll realize from avoiding any taxes created by the fund manager.

2) The lemon drop. Hoping to skim off some of that skyrocketing Apple stock? Cover a portion of your capital gain by also selling your brother in law’s “can’t lose” loser. There’s no time like now to weed your portfolio of positions that aren’t going anywhere. Although you’re only allowed to show $3k in net capital losses each year, leftovers can be carried over to deduct in future years.

3) Charitable giving. Hopefully you’ve given to your favorite community non-profits throughout the year, but if not (and especially if you itemize), you’ll want to make cash and in-kind donations in before December 31. Keep receipts for your gifts. The IRS has tightened charitable giving laws in recent years.

4) Estimate your taxes and decide when to pay property taxes. If you own a home winter taxes are deductible either in December or January, your choice. Did you receive a big bonus this year? Take the extra deduction now to help lower your tax due. If you make too much, it might be a better idea to wait until next year. High income earners aren’t allowed to claim all of their itemized deductions (ask your accountant about whether you’re subject to phaseouts).

5) Goal evaluation and setting. The 4th quarter is the perfect time to begin thinking about your short and long term goals. Did you hit your benchmark in 2012? If not, what are you going to change in 2013?

While people generally talk a good game about benchmarking, most of my clients were surprised when I pulled the actual number out of their plan to see if they’d hit the mark during a year. By sticking with actual data and avoiding the “Yeah, it feels like I had a good year” you’ll be able to make the necessary course corrections to save the right amount of money in the upcoming year.

I’ll be addressing each of these areas in more detail during the course of the quarter, but do yourself a favor and schedule these tasks now. These are five activities that you don’t want to miss!

What other events are on your 4th quarter financial calendar?

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Facebook and Morgan Stanley: Who is To Blame?

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Whose responsibility is it when your investment in Facebook or Morgan Stanley declines in value? The company? A broker?

Certainly you’re not to blame.

The current proliferation of lawsuits against these companies makes me ask a straightforward question. Should there be lawsuits against Facebook and Morgan Stanley? (See these articles for more information if you don’t know what I’m talking about: Forbes: Facebook Lawsuits Piling Up.)

I’m reminded of society’s lack of personal responsibility each and every time I drive up the highway to see my mom.  I haven’t added all the advertisements up, but there is a certain personal injury lawyer in our town who advertises everywhere.  I don’t know this lawyer intimately, but my wife works in the same office building and sees the people who come in and out of the front door.  There are all sorts of people trying to sue for anything under the sun.  Instead of trying to take over the world, they’ll just take it from someone else, because somehow, they’re “owed” something.

One of my favorite books is The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck, M.D.  That book contains my favorite quote from any book:

We cannot solve life’s problems except by solving them. This statement may seem idiotically tautological or self-evident, yet it is seemingly beyond the comprehension of much of the human race. This is because we must accept responsibility for a problem before we can solve it. We cannot solve a problem by saying “It’s not my problem.” We cannot solve a problem by hoping that someone else will solve it for us. I can solve a problem only when I say “This is my problem and it’s up to me to solve it.”  But many, so many, seek to avoid the pain of their problems by saying to themselves: “This problem was caused me by other people, or social circumstances beyond my control, and therefore it is up to other people or society to solve this problem for me. It is not really my personal problem.”

This is as true in the investment world as anywhere. As an investor, you must accept responsibility for your own investing decisions.  You cannot blame others for your decisions (or indecisions).  You won’t help your cause with a “I’m mad I made a bad decision in investing so I wanna sue everyone” mentality.  Recent lawsuits against Facebook and Morgan Stanley make me crazy – I don’t believe for a second that if some magical prospectus would’ve fallen from the sky that all these people wouldn’t have bought Facebook stock.  There’s all this talk about how Morgan Stanley screwed everyone and how Facebook lied — why didn’t these people do their own research?  Take some personal responsibility!  I’m pretty sure that had Facebook stock gone from $38 to $75 in one day, Morgan Stanley would not have called all the new shareholders and said “Oops, we priced this incorrectly so we need to sue you to find a more correct price.”

As an investor, you and you alone are responsible for the actions and outcomes of your investing decisions.  Whether you have an advisor, a consultant, or are a DIY’er, remember one thing: it’s your money.

Be accountable for it.

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Stop Reading About Last Year’s Top Ten Mutual Funds

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Okay, play before work: when theOtherGuy and I were designing the new site last Friday, it was a total nightmare. I wanted to get the Blog Post of the Week! up before midnight (so that Andrea from SoOverDebt.com could get both of our reader’s attention). Running out of time, I just grabbed a pic of my blog-writing friend Cooper. My cat.

Yesterday, my friend Doug—who has a lifetime of tech work behind him–was commenting on the new site layout:

(finally) Doug: …and one more thing, get rid of the cat picture.

me: Ha!

Doug: I know you think I’m joking. I’m not. It’s a deal breaker. Take down the cat.

me: (suddenly miffed for no reason whatsoever): Ha!

So now, completely out of spite, Cooper’s pic is going to stay on the site for the next seven days. Our Alexa site rank will probably plummet. No advertisers will touch us (nothing new there). But because Doug said “deal breaker”, Cooper gets his seven days of near-fame.

Now, on with the show……

SmartMoney.com yesterday published a list of the top 100 funds of the past 5 years. We’re inundated with these types of lists in January. I had a rare opportunity to read USA Today on my way home from Disney last week, and long-time finance writer John Waggoner penned a piece titled Fund Investors Ran in Place in ‘11. The story discussed what we already know: 2011 was a roller coaster year, with the average stock fund, according to Lipper, losing 2.9 percent. Investors are scrambling to find better results.

That wasn’t shocking.

What I found annoying was the story’s partner: “More on Funds, Quarterly, Yearly Results Tables….”. It was pretty much the same story I saw yesterday at SmartMoney. The obvious (unstated) connection I believe readers will make is that they’ll find better fund by reviewing the best ones from last quarter or last year.

USA Today and SmartMoney wouldn’t run stories featuring the top ten mutual funds (or 100….or whatever) if people didn’t search for this information. I don’t fault them at all. It sells. Turning to the USA Today piece, here’s a listing of the 4th quarter’s best and worst, as well as the 12 months’ best and worst funds. One page over I find the list of the top funds over 5 and 10 years.

Yuck.

Stop reading about the Top Ten Mutual Funds.

In his seminal investing book The Truth About Money 4th Edition’ target=_blank>The Truth About Money, financial advisor Ric Edelman discusses this thirst people have to throw money at last year’s winners. We want to own winning funds. Many of us have heard grandpa tell stories about the legendary returns of Fidelity Magellan back in the day, or of that high-flying Janus Twenty fund in the months leading up to the tech wreck. We want those days back. We’d love nothing more than to be invested with some manager who always makes us money. But as Edelman describes, history works against you if you’re trying to find great results this year by reviewing last year’s winners.

Looking at the top ten mutual funds rarely produces winning result.

WHY SHOULDN’T I INVEST IN LAST YEAR’S WINNERS?

  • When everyone clamors to enter a fund, investing millions of new dollars, the fund is doomed to failure. According to this study: Star Power: The Effect of Morningstar Ratings on Mutual Fund Flow, funds with high returns one year and Morningstar rating upgrades nearly immediately experience an unnaturally high gain in assets. These assets must be invested by the manager, who finds it more difficult to spread the investment among quality names. You’ll rarely find a manager can keep up with these huge asset spikes.
  • Often, the top ten mutual funds and ETFs are in specific categories which spiked during that calendar year. In 2010, commodity names like silver and cotton performed handsomely. In other years, real estate, large company stocks, or internet stocks have been big winners. If you invested in silver or cotton in January, 2011 based on 2010 results, you stepped in it. To mis-quote Sarah Palin, “how’s that workin’ for ya’ now?”
  • You may pay handsomely for a top fund. Funds with high expenses which spike may be especially dangerous. One top fund of 2010, Morgan Stanley Focus Growth B (AMOBX) carries an expense ratio of 1.77 percent. This fund competes against the S&P 500. If you’d purchased iShares S&P 500 index exchange traded fund, your expense would have been 0.09 percent, plus any trading costs. Big difference.

Here are some top funds, ETFs and ETNs listed in “best of” 2010 publications and their 2011 results:

Fund Name 2010 Result 2010 S&P 2011 Result 2011 S&P Who Listed
M.S. Focus Growth B AMOBX 25.87 15.06 -6.43 2.11 The Street
Fidelity Growth Co. FDGRX 20.55   0.67   The
Street
Fidelity Contrafund FCNTX 16.93   -0.12   The
Street
Proshares Ultra Silver AGQ 182.44   -47.47   USA Today
iPath DJ-UBS Cotton Index 96.22   -22.71   USA Today

In November of 2010, TheStreet.com listed the top performing funds competing with the S&P 500 here.

In January 2011, USA Today published a chart of the top performing funds of the year, which included ETFs and ETNs.

HOW SHOULD I PICK FUNDS?

(Photo credit: Crosa: Wikimedia Commons)

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Federal Reserve Report: Hang On For Rough Ride…

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Here’s a depressing recent headline. Today the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco released a report predicting that the financial markets are unlikely to be strong for the next…drum roll please…16 years!

Can this be accurate?

The report, titled “Boomer Retirement: Headwind for U.S. Equity Markets?” illustrates long-range, historical data which suggests that as the boomer generation moves into retirement, they’ll pull an increasing amount of money out of equity funds.  This can only mean increased pressure on stocks for years to come.

This is classic ‘supply & demand’ economics at work here, folks. 

Roughly 10,000 baby-boomers turn 60 EVERY DAY, a trend that will continue for the foreseeable future.  As each of these 10,000 individuals leaves the workforce, they need money to spend in retirement.  Where will their meals come from?  That’s right.  Their spending money will come, in part, from investment portfolios.

As the report points out “…to finance retirement, they are likely to sell off acquired assets, especially risky assets.  A looming concern is that this massive sell-off might depress equity values.”

Take a look at this projection:

According to the research in this report, P/E ratios, an indicator of potential stock prices, is slated to continue downward through the early 2020s before rebounding in the latter half of that decade.

“Figure 2 shows that P/E should decline persistently from about 15 in 2010 to about 8.4 in 2025, before recovering to 9.14 in 2030.”

The report continues: “The model-generated path for real stock prices implied by demographic trends is quite bearish.  Real stock prices follow a downward trend until 2021, cumulatively declining 13% relative to 2010…real stock prices are not expected to return to their 2010 levels until 2027.”

Ouch.  That could sting a little.

So what does this data imply?

Should we all be in bonds until 2030?  Quite the contrary.  There will likely still be bullish trends throughout the upcoming cycle, so it pays to be vigilant. 

Instead, I believe this heralds the end of “buy and hold and you’ll be fine” investing.

This mean you’ll need to be cognizant of market trends and invest accordingly.  What does your advisor think about this report?  In all likelihood, he’s never heard of it, and will probably say something like “Just invest and stick with the plan, and you’ll be OK.”

You can do better.  If you just pay attention to the signs, you can profit from both sides of the market, both the ups and downs.  You just have to pay attention.

If you’d like to read this report for yourself, it’s available here or type in http://www.frbsf.org/publications/economics/letter/2011/el2011-26.html to read for yourself.

I’m interested in your thoughts…post your comments below.