Hey, thanks for the insight man! Super interesting to hear, appreciate that.

As to the phone calls, I did bite the bullet and allow them to manage a portion (~$120k) of my assets. Personal Capital uses Pershing to hold managed assets. The fee for management is 0.89% of managed assets and drops as assets increase. Their philosophy is to have a more balanced sector holding than market index funds tend to have and are invested in low cost (and no load) ETF’s. My investments are almost entirely in Vanguard funds with them.

Their team also works with you on other financial aspects, for which they do not have any products to offer, as part of their fiduciary philosophy. They have done an insurance review, legal entity review, 401k review, and estate review for me.

You could certainly track the rentals. Each rental could be input as an asset, and in fact you can set it to update the value in real time based on Zillow value (or keep it simple and leave it as a static value YOU control/update :) ). Then link the mortgages. Then you can create custom income and expense categories (rental income/rental expense or rental 1 income / rental 1 expense, rental 2 income, rental 2 expense…).

You could probably set everything up in 30-60 minutes and then it’s just a matter of a few minutes per month to click and categorize the expenses to the right category/property(ies). And the system has smart categorization, so once you categorize a vendor/payment a certain way it’ll default to that category in the future (which you have to keep an eye on because sometimes Walmart is a grocery expense, sometimes home maintenance, sometimes might be a rental expense, sometimes gift, etc).

Yup – they’re def. not for everyone :) In fact, I use old school spreadsheets still, but only because I like the more hands-on approach than automated (the #’s feel more real to me that way). That being said, most of society can’t stand dealing with their finances, so being able to see all your money in one place like this is great! Whether with Personal Capital, Mint, Clarity Money, or even just your online bank… And these days, most of our financial data is already scattered around everywhere so for most of us it’s too late :)

How can I say… It is nice that there is something that people like so much, that is so popular, that I have been unable to find any reviews that have anything non-wonderful to say… (“If it sounds too good to be true…”)

So I will say it. I have reservations. Not that Personal Capital isn’t a great tool. It is. But there must be considerations otherwise.

Not meaning to bash Personal Capital or any similar sites. I am sure the people there aim to do a great job. But the data you give them is your data, it is your complete financial life.

Personal Capital only works for U.S. accounts :( Here’s a note from their support:

“Although you can access the Personal Capital application from any location, we currently only support U.S based financial institutions (currency, USD) for linking accounts. Note that to sign up for Personal Capital, you will need a valid U.S. phone number for security reasons.”