Personal Capital is not available in Canada.
Personal Capital provides wealth management services and a free financial dashboard that helps users track their personal net worth, budget their finances, and invest.
Their primary focus is on retirement planning and providing these tools to ensure financial preparedness when retiring.
Personal Capital also provides wealth management services, however, only with a minimum investment of $100,000.
Best Alternatives to Personal Capital Canada
Interactive Brokers
Pros
- Ability to purchase fractional shares.
- Low commissions, especially for high-frequency traders.
Cons
- The platform is not as user-friendly as other options.
- The pricing structure is complex, and understanding commissions may be difficult at first.
Wealthsimple Trade
Pros
- No account minimums required.
- Easy-to-use mobile and web platforms.
Cons
- Plus subscription required to have a USD account to avoid FX fees.
- Lack of advanced features such as options trading.
Mint
Pros
- Mint is completely free to the general public and includes several features and alerts that users wouldn’t get from traditional financial institutions.
- Customizable personal financial reports and easily digestible presentation.
Cons
- Does not have any investing features.
Several companies provide similar, if not the same, types of services that Personal Capital offers.
Even though there are different alternatives to Personal Capital in Canada, choosing the right one will require investors to define their needs and select the platform that best matches them.
Interactive Brokers
Interactive Brokers is a great broker for Canadians.
The costs of trading are extremely low, and there are several different pricing structures to choose from depending on the type of trader you are.
The fixed pricing structure offers trading for as low as $0.005 per share of US equities, with a minimum of $1 and a maximum of 1% of the trade value.
For the tiered structure, pricing starts at $0.0035 per share for the first 300,000 shares and drops to $0.0005.
As you can see, high-frequency traders are likely to benefit the most from the Interactive Brokers pricing structure.
In addition, Interactive Brokers has some of the lowest (if not the lowest) margin rates in the industry.
Aside from stocks, investors also have access to a wide range of other assets, including ETFs, options, futures, FOPs, warrants, structured products, SSFs, currencies, commodities, indices, fixed income, and mutual funds.
Interactive Brokers offers their Canadian clients a variety of account options.
Both registered and non-registered accounts can be created in just a few simple clicks.
TFSA, RRSP, Spousal RRSP, margin accounts, and various trust accounts are all available through the trading platform.
Interactive Brokers also offers the ability to trade fractional shares, except in RRSP and TFSA accounts.
This feature has been highly requested, as it allows for traders operating with small sums of money in their accounts to buy stock in companies with high individual share prices such as Amazon.
The investment platform offers both a mobile application and a desktop application, both of which have an initial learning curve to them.
However, once users get a grasp of the interface, there are a variety of useful features that can be used to conduct research to make better financial decisions.
Lastly, Interactive Brokers also offers interest up to 4.83% on idle cash balances sitting in your trading account.
Will Personal Capital be Coming to Canada?
Unfortunately, at this time, Personal Capital is not available in Canada and has no plans to expand outside the United States.
What Is Personal Capital?
Personal Capital was one of the first robo-advisors in the digital investment management sector.
It offers a variety of free money management and investment tools that users can utilize for investment management, cash flow, and retirement planning.
Despite the free services, Personal Capital requires a minimum investment of $100,000 to use its wealth management services.
The AUM fees start at 0.89% from $100,000 up to $1,000,000 and are reduced as additional capital is invested.
Generally, people with higher net worth can take advantage of the investment management services custom-tailored to the individual and the dedicated certified financial advisors.
Through the Advisors Personal Strategy process, Personal Capital can customize a portfolio for each client based on a questionnaire the client fills out and an interview with their certified financial advisor.
The questionnaire feeds into an algorithm based on the following factors and others to reach a potential portfolio: assets, timeline and goals for specific periods, risk tolerance, net worth and income and more.
Personal Capital dives deep into personal finances and goals and can make an educated recommendation through this process.
In addition to the wealth management services, Personal Capital also provides services such as: goal planning, account services (banking), cash management and more.
It’s up to you to decide whether Personal Capital is the best option for your needs.
Image: Personalcapital.com
Fun Fact
Personal Capital’s algorithm is designed to optimize your portfolio to minimize tax yield loss. The strategy includes asset allocation in tax-efficient accounts, investing in tax-efficient funds, and tax loss harvesting.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Is Personal Capital available in Canada?
- Is the Personal Capital app legit?
