Is There a Superior Canadian Alternative to Personal Capital?
If you’re anything like me, then you have financial and bank accounts at multiple locations. Keeping track of all of these accounts can be cumbersome and annoying. Personal Capital lets you keep track of all of your accounts in one place, making it easy to track your net worth and investments. But is the Personal Capital app available in Canada? And if not, what is the best Canadian alternative?
What is Personal Capital?
Personal Capital is a wealth management service that also offers a free financial dashboard. Founded in 2009 and headquartered in San Carlos, California, Personal Capital currently has over 2 million users. But it’s important to note that their users primarily take advantage of the free financial dashboard.
The financial dashboard is a combination of a budgeting app, net worth tracker, and investment tool. You can set up a free account and then link your existing financial and bank accounts (investment, chequing, savings, credit card, employer-sponsored retirement plans) to your dashboard. The free service also enables you to use their investment checkup tool to analyze your investment accounts.
Personal Capital focuses on retirement planning. They have tools to help ensure that your financial preparedness for retirement.
The other part of Personal Capital is its wealth management services. To access these, you must have a minimum of $100,000 in investments. The wealth management services are essentially a robo-advisor with live online support from a financial advisor 24/7. When you sign up for the premium service, you are assigned 2 financial advisors for your portfolio.
These advisors will help you create a portfolio based on your preferences and financial goals.
The management fee for the premium service is 0.89%, which is higher than most Canadian robo-advisors.
Is Personal Capital Available in Canada?
Unfortunately, no Personal Capital software is not available to Canadian investors, and they have no current plans to expand to Canada either. To access their services (free or paid), you need to be a US citizen or permanent resident at least 18 years of age.
Canadian Alternative to Personal Capital
There are two parts to Personal Capital, the wealth management services and the free financial dashboard. Because the free dashboard is the most popular part of the company, that’s the focus of this article. But if you are looking for more information on Canadian robo-advisors, here is where you can find it. And I would highly suggest looking into Wealthsimple.
Even though Personal Capital is not available in Canada, I would argue that Canada has a better free alternative in Wealthica.
Wealthica was founded in 2015 in Montreal by Martin Leclair and Simon Boulet. It is a platform that lets you keep and track all of your investment information in one place. You can link to an unlimited number of supported institutions, and there are currently more than 100 supported institutions.
There are no ads with Wealthica, and they offer bank-level security while updating and syncing your investment information daily.
Wealthica Features
Secure – Wealthica uses 2-factor identification and bank-level security. And all of your information is stored within Canada.
Analyze & track fees – the platform makes it easy to analyze and track your fees and how they affect your investment’s overall performance over time. Evaluating fees is an essential feature as it’s difficult to track the impact of fees through most investment platforms.
Family tracking – with Wealthica you can create groups and a family online dashboard. This feature makes it easy to track your family’s net worth. You also can add notes, reminders, and milestones.
Consolidated transactions – have all your investments in one place, preventing the need to log into multiple accounts to track your net worth progress and transactions.
Share with your advisors – you have the option to share your information with your financial advisors keeping all your data in one place.
Web and app platforms – Wealthica is available on desktop, but they also have a highly rated (4.7 stars in the Apple app store) app.
Pricing – the best part about Wealthica is the amount of usability offered under their free-forever plan. With their free-forever plan, you can track your net worth and investments all in one place. And monitoring your information is easy through their platforms with the number of different graphs and visuals available. But you can pay a little extra ($5.95/month) to add the Google spreadsheet export or a bit more ($15.95/month) for 3rd party add-ons like Wealthscope.
How to Sign Up For Wealthica
Signing up for Wealthica is an easy 3 step process:
- Sign up for your free account
- Link your investment accounts
- Daily syncing of your information.
Wealthica vs. Personal Capital
When it comes to Personal Capital’s free financial dashboard, Wealthica is a superior Canadian alternative.
The founders of Wealthica created it from something they were already using themselves. Because Personal Capital has a premium upgrade, maybe the only purpose of their free version is to feed clients into their paid wealth management services.
Wealthica makes its money by selling its API to other fintech companies and offering other upgrades. This is a welcome relief for the user – no worries about high-pressure sales here.
Where Wealthica falls short in its comparison to Personal Capital is on the robo-advisor side of things. If this is what you are looking for, then working with one of Canada’s robo-advisors and then linking your account to the Wealthica dashboard is a good alternative.
The benefit of this alternative is that Canadian robo-advisors charge fees much lower than Personal Capital’s fees. So with a little work as a Canadian, you can work with a superior product to the popular Personal Capital.
