Contents
The Offer
No direct link, shows up when logged in
- Personal Capital is offering some users $200 if you agree to take a call from an Advisor and a follow up call to receive a proposal
Our Verdict
Previously we’ve seen a deal for $100, this is for $200. People have Personal Capital accounts due to previous $50/$100 opening bonuses. I doubt the proposal will make much sense to go through with, but this should be an easy $200.
Hat tip to reader John A
I got the $200 but I did have to contact customer service 2 times over a 2 month period plus fill out a customer satisfaction survey with a poor rating saying I didn’t receive the bonus. Magically the money was deposited in my account the next day. I got the feeling they hoped I would give up.
I did this $200 offer in October, and after four months the bonus hadn’t posted. I followed up a couple times, and eventually they offered $200 in Amazon gift cards instead. Pretty weird. I accepted the Amazon gift cards because I didn’t want to pursue it any further.
Today when I logged in to Personal Capital I had the $200 offer. Earlier this year they targeted me for the $100 offer, and had snail mailed me the offer. Scheduled my call for next week!
Thank you DoC for letting us know they had a better offer, or I would have taken the $100.
Received 200 bonus on 8/18 after having the calls at the end up June.
I had my first call after registering for the $200 promotion today. I made it very clear from the outset that I was just doing this for the $200, that I had declined previous Personal Capital offers of a free consultation because I was not interested. He accepted that and we had a chat for exactly 30 minutes, very laid back, mostly me talking about my general situation and plans and investment stragedy, with him asking a few questions, but not many. I was candid about why I use Personal Capital platform (sector graphics) and that we are interested in only occasional fee-based advisory serves – not any kind of AUM deal. He had most of my info in the system to look at. We scheduled the second call for TOMORROW, where he said to expect about an hour-long presentation of their proposal for me. I have to create the Cash account afterward to receive the $200, which has its own privacy policy, etc. Seems worth it for $200. WIll report back if it turns out other than as expected.
Had the followup call today, the day after my first call. Not too pushy, just not offering free advice today – “we can get into that if you decide to work with us” when a question came up along the way today. He presented a suggested plan based on what he sees in my account and the info I gave him yesterday. Their strategy is to equally balance investments across sectors, interestingly, regardless of where we are in the business cycle. That gives me something to think about, and I get $200 – a fair deal, I think. They are a fiduciary, said they do not sell any products or have any deals with specific issuers or fund companies, focus on individual stocks. But no way is what they offer worth 0.89% annually.
Too poor for their blood! Workin on it…
How’s the PC software lately? Worth signing your data over for? Mintuitkarma now knows everything about me, is it worth sharing with another company that Intuit might swallow up?
Empower (which administers a ton of workplace retirement plans) owns PC now – I’d think of it more like “do I want another massive financial group knowing everything about me?”
I got frustrated as Mint’s site got buggier and buggier for me and the link process wasn’t working as well, so I dropped it for PC.
I had problems syncing Mint as there were some accounts that just gave up being synch-able; only to discover that the same thing happened for Personal Capital. I got tired of listing my account(s) as problematic on the Support board for the latter in particular; and being told either that (a) everyone was having the same problem; or (b), that no one was having the same problem, and thus (assuming) it was extremely low priority on their part to solve.
I got this offer via snail mail earlier this week. I just completed the first call with an advisor. Some notes for those considering the deal:
1) Deal requires 2 phone calls. The first call was ~25 minutes and just an advisor asking questions and gather info. He asked about income, savings, investments, allocation, risk tolerance, debt, goals, and age. Nothing too crazy but some may not want to give all that info out. A second call was scheduled for next week in order for the advisor to go over my “free” financial analysis. I expect this to be a sales pitch. The advisor said it would take about a hour.
2) PC requires $100k in investments for them to work with you. Your current employer’s 401k won’t count toward this. I’m not sure if having less would disqualify you from the deal or not but it may since PC wouldn’t be able to work with you and so they may not proceed with the second call.
3) The bonus requires a Personal Capital Cash account. In order to establish one of those I had to link 2 banks, a credit card, and investment accounts to PC. A bit of work but again, some may not want to give all that info to PC.
You could always lie about some of the personal info like income, finances if you weren’t comfortable sharing outright.
Thank you for this information. Interested to know what they try to sale you on that second call, if you don’t mind sharing?
They want you to move your assets to them to manage for which they’ll charge a fee. The analysis there do between meetings is pretty decent though. Just too expensive for me
Just finished call number 2. It clocked in at 59 minutes with the last 10 or so being a sales pitch (“would you like to use PC as a financial manager? what is preventing you from using PC? etc.).
The analysis presented prior to that was good but entirely focused on investing. My investments are almost all in index funds so they tried to dissuade me and explain why that isn’t optimal. I’d say that if you’re well versed in investing, confident in your plan, and don’t mind giving up the time to sit on the calls then sure, go for the deal to get $200. PC’s management fee is high (0.89%) in my opinion for not a ton a benefit so if you think you may actually give into their sales pitch then I’d consider sitting this one out.
I’ll update again when the bonus posts.
thank you for the feedback
Bonus posted today (8/19)
I wonder if solo401k counts towards it or not…
Did this already. I’m pretty savvy and don’t need these services. Personally I think paying a percentage of assets is way overpriced. If you need a cfp I’d use the xy planning network and find an hourly fee advisor. Say you retire with 2 million dollars and live 30 years. Paying your advisor 1% over 30 years will cost you around 2million dollars. To me there are enough resources out there with Mr money mustache, jl Collins and the choosefi foundation to learn this yourself. But if you must hire someone, make sure they are a fiduciary with a cfp and only a fiduciary. In this industry people can be both a fiduciary and a broker salesman(stay away from these people see Edward Jones as the worst example). And I would pay 300 an hour for advice to a fiduciary only cfp before I’d ever use a free broker or a percent of assets advisor.
Thanks for posting that. I know paying some advisor 1% is a huge cost
No luck for me. One thing to note, I had all of their email subscriptions turned off, so I tried turning these on to (hopefully) improve my odds of getting an offer like this:
Engagement Communications (Personal Capital Touchpoints)
Advisor Communications (Retirement Analyses, Portfolios Reviews, Financial Advice)
Wealth Management Communications (Promotions, Special Offers)
I don’t think that I’ve ever gotten calls from PC before (heard they were annoyingly persistent with those, which is part of why I turned all subscriptions off), but I have a vague memory that I did in the past and turned them down. If this is potentially on the table, I hope that I haven’t actually talked to them before.