Call me weird, but one of the things that I take pleasure in doing is our finances each month. I don’t know why, but I like to pay the bills and make sure that we are staying on track. One of the hardest things for me over the past few years is that with having a wife and a child as well as having a small business, we have a lot of accounts to manage. Now, even though I love to oversee our finances, I am not the best at keeping track of our spending and could probably do a better job. I have tried a couple of different ways to do this, but have not found something that I can stick with and find useful.
I wanted something where I could just dump all my accounts into and see where and how we are spending our money and where we can cut back. When I read about Personal Capital a few weeks ago, I figured I would try it out to see how well it would work for me. After putting it through its paces, I found that it definitely has some nice features that I like. Let’s take a look at it more and see whether this would be a good program for you.
Adding Your Accounts
The first thing you are going to want to do is to add your bank accounts that you want to track. This process, depends on how many accounts you want to track, can take a little time, so you will have to be patient. But, one of the first things that I noticed right away was the fact that I could add any and all of my accounts to Personal Capital and it would recognize it. Not only can I add bank accounts, but credit cards, mortgages, loans, stocks, retirement accounts, etc. It would even recognize my small little credit union that I use. This to me, made the app so much more useful than anything else I tried. I have tried other similar web apps and none of them could add all the accounts that I have, so Personal Capital was off to a good start for me.
Adding accounts to Personal Capital
Using the Data
Another thing that I appreciated about this app was the shear amount of data that they presented you with. The Dashboard, which is the main page for all your accounts shows you an overview of all your accounts with your net worth, cash flow, and if you have stocks, your portfolio and how they are doing. On the left hand side are all your accounts at a glance, where they are separated by the type they are associated with.
The Dashboard
If you want to see more information about a specific account you can click on it and it will give you a graph of your money and all the transactions. You can glance at your spending and change the categories if Personal Capital did not organize it correctly for you. This is a great view to see the balance of your accounts and to make sure what is being recorded is actually what you are spending your money on.
Looking at data from a specific account
There is another page called My Cash where it gives you a chat of the spending and income of all your cash accounts. What is nice about this view is that you can see graphs for a specific account and also any category. So maybe you want to see how much you spent on eating out this past month in a specific account, you can do this and get a nice graph as well as all the transactions that are being represented.
My Cash view
Another useful feature is that because you are connecting your accounts to Personal Capital, it can pull in data from your bank. In this case it can pull in information to know when your next credit card bill is due and you can see all the relevant information about it as well. Once you are done paying the bill, you can check it off from the list.
Bill reminders
The last area of data that can come in handy is the My Investment page, where you can track any of your investments that you have connected to the app. You can get a lot of information about your stocks, bonds and whatever else you have invested in as well as get education material for future investing. Since I am not a huge investor, this part was not as useful for me, but I can see how it can provide some good information for those that are interested.
My Investments page
Not For Everyone
As much as I have liked using Personal Capital, I know and understand how it may not be for everyone. People have their own personal preferences as to how they like to manage their finances and that is totally fine. In my opinion, Personal Capital will be great for those that want to know more than just the basics with their finances. They present you with a lot of data to use and I can see how it can be overwhelming for people who just want to track their finances.
The nice part about Personal Capital is that it is very flexible in that even if you don’t want to use the investment piece of it, you don’t have to and you won’t be overwhelmed by it. You can use it to its fullest extent or only one or two features and it can still work fine for you. Although, there was a lot of data to use, I liked that it didn’t get in the way if I didn’t want to use it.
Final Thoughts
Personal Capital is a great web app to keep track of your finances and to take a deeper look into how you are spending your money. I like that it has a lot of options to track not only your finances, but credit cards, and investments as well. They also have an iPad and iPhone app, which were great to use, as I got a chance to play with both of them.
There is no cost to use Personal Capital for all the features that I mentioned above, which is a great deal for what they offer. If you choose to use them as a personal investment advisor then there is a charge for that. But, if you are looking for an easy and detailed way to keep track of your finances, you need to check this app out. They give you great visuals as well as lots of data to make sure you are staying on track of your spending so that you can make better financial decisions in the future.