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Handling your personal financial management needs online is just a sign of the times.
Whether it's using financial management software on your laptop or turning to a mobile option to handle your budgets, debts, and investments, digital downloads are the way to go in today's personal financial management marketplace.
Two of the leading companies in the sector - Quicken and Personal Capital - are used more than most digital financial management packages, and for good reason - they both get the job done, and at a reasonable price (in one case, no cost.)
Let's take a thumbnail view of both financial management software providers, and see how they stack up against one another.
While Quicken has been around for three decades, the company split off from long-time owner Intuit (INTU - Get Report) and re-emerged as an independent firm in 2016, when some of the early founders stepped up and took control of the company.
Quicken, which charges a subscription fee to use the service, offers basic, in-demand financial management services, like tracking spending, creating budgets, and monitoring bank and credit account balances. The software offers bill paying services on its software and its mobile app, and offers digital-age solutions like bill payment alerts and customized financial reporting.
Personal Capital is a free, digital-only personal financial management tool that manages all of a user's financial accounts on a single platform. The platform syncs with a user's bank, investment and credit card accounts, listing all assets, liabilities, outstanding debt owed by category, and account transaction histories.
Personal Capital draws high marks from users for its asset and investment management tools to help users keep their retirement savings on track, plan big investment savings campaigns (like college and early retirement) and allows you to see how your investment portfolio is performing dynamically, and in real time.
Personal Capital has a slew of new and improved features in its 2019 release - here's a snapshot:
Quicken, too, has a host of new tools and features in its 2019 release - here's a look:
Despite existing (and thriving) under the personal financial management digital umbrella, Quicken and Personal Capital vary in important ways - and platform users should understand those differences before they start using either program.
Here's a snapshot of five key variations between Quicken and Personal Capital:
Quicken makes its bread and butter on drilling down into a money management problem, and that's evident in its retirement planning channel.
While Personal Capital has a solid analysis tool that takes a deep dive into your portfolio and tracks your progress, Quicken allows a more hands-on experience for users, playing out various 'Lifetime Planner' scenarios to see how each plays out.
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That gives users a real-world view of what could happen on the path to retirement, and allows the user to have an interactive experience - much more so than Personal Capital.
Quicken has a solid personal budgeting feature that matches up personal spending history with household budget management. That gives users a real-life look at their spending habits, and how they're impacting the household budget, and enables them to create unique budgeting and realistic budgeting goals going forward, while allowing to better manage current bill payment realities, too.
Personal Capital's budgeting platform also enables users to you to easily build a household budget, create a monthly spending target, and check in on budgeting performance in a real-time fashion. The platform allows you to track your income by date and source, even if you have multiple bank accounts (you'll need to sync all your accounts with Personal Capital to take advantage of this feature.)
Quicken, like many financial service platform providers, offers users an updated (quarterly) credit score VantageScore from Equifax (EFX - Get Report) .
It's not the actual FICO credit score that creditors use to evaluate your credit risk, but it does give you a good snapshot of where your credit stands, and what you can do to improve your credit score.
While Personal Capital does provide personal financial data that definitely impacts our credit score, it doesn't provide an actual credit score to users.
Personal Capital gets the nod when it comes to lining up your financial account data with the digital financial platform, updating information on an automatic basis, while Quicken draws more complaints from end users about an inferior account synching experience.
The most common complaints about Quicken's synching performance is that users have to download transactions manually and then move those transactions over to the Quicken platform.
Personal Capital also has an edge in updating all financial account data on the company's digital dashboard, while Quicken doesn't update a user's financial data automatically, a user experience that seems dated given the remarkable leaps in financial technology in recent years.
You can't be 'free' for a quality online financial management platform and Personal Capital certainly delivers on that front. In fact, it's no-cost access to its menu of digital personal financial tools is a huge attraction to budget-minded consumers.
Personal Capital does charge for a customized portfolio investment strategy - between 0.49%-and-0.89% of assets under management, which is generally in line (and better than most) traditional asset management firms. A nice feature is available for higher income earners - a pair of dedicated financial advisers to work on the accounts of platform users who bring $200,000 or more in assets to the table.
It's not that Quicken costs a bundle - it doesn't. The platform, which transitioned to a subscription-only model in 2018, charges between $34.99 and $99 a year for its Quicken for Windows personal financial management package, which gives you access to the company's bread-and-butter budgeting, bill payment and investment tracking services, among other features.
That's a good deal, but if its free basic digital financial management services you're after, Personal Capital offers the ultimate bargain basement price.
Besides, most banks now offer free online bill pay, which does dilute the value of paying for Quicken's bill payment service, which is included in the company's tiered subscription price.
Both Quicken and Personal Capital offer personal financial consumers a healthy dose of value and creativity in managing their money.
Take a test drive and see which platform meets your unique personal financial money management needs.