Overview of Personal Capital Advisors (Now Empower)
Personal Capital Advisors, now operating under the brand Empower, is a comprehensive financial management platform that combines advanced technology with human advisory services to help users manage their finances, investments, and retirement plans.
What Personal Capital Advisors Does
Personal Capital Advisors is designed to provide a unified view of all your financial accounts, including bank accounts, credit cards, brokerage accounts, retirement accounts (such as IRAs and 401(k)s), and more. The platform offers both free financial tracking tools and paid wealth management services.
Key Features and Functionality
Free Financial Tools
- Account Aggregation: Link all your financial accounts to get a real-time view of your net worth, cash flow, budget, and portfolio balance in one place.
- Budgeting and Cash Flow Tracking: Automatically categorize transactions to track income, expenses, and net expenditures. Compare spending between different periods to manage your financial health effectively.
- Portfolio Visualization: Analyze your investment portfolio across categories such as cash, international stocks, U.S. stocks, international bonds, U.S. bonds, alternatives, and unclassified assets. This tool helps in understanding your asset allocation and comparing your portfolio’s performance against major stock market indices.
- Retirement Planning: Use the retirement planner to estimate how your investments will perform throughout retirement. Adjust parameters like spending, saving, and retirement date to see how your projection changes.
Wealth Management Services
- Tiered Advisory Services: Depending on the amount of assets under management, users can access different levels of service:
- Investment Services Clients ($100,000 to $200,000): Unlimited advice from the financial advisory team, retirement planning, investment review, professionally managed ETF portfolios, portfolio monitoring, rebalancing, and tax optimization.
- Wealth Management Clients ($200,000 to $1 million and above): In addition to the above services, users get two dedicated financial advisors, access to specialists, and customized portfolio management including individual stocks.
- Human Advisory: For higher asset balances, users gain access to dedicated financial advisors available via email, phone, and video chat. This combines the benefits of human advice with technological efficiency.
- Tax-Loss Harvesting: This feature helps minimize tax payments by offsetting gains with losses from selling underwater investments.
Fees
The fees for wealth management services are tiered based on the assets under management:
- 0.89%/yr. for balances up to $1 million
- 0.79%/yr. for balances between $1 and $3 million
- 0.69%/yr. for balances between $3 and $5 million
- 0.59%/yr. for balances between $5 and $10 million
- 0.49%/yr. for balances above $10 million.
Additional Benefits
- Fiduciary Duty: Personal Capital Advisors operates as a fiduciary, meaning they prioritize the client’s interests.
- Investment Efficiency: The platform provides tools to analyze your portfolio’s holdings based on size, style, and sector, and recommends specific dollar amounts to invest in each asset class to achieve optimal asset allocation.
Overall, Personal Capital Advisors offers a robust suite of tools and services that cater to both DIY investors and those seeking professional wealth management, making it a versatile and powerful resource for managing one’s financial health.