Choosing between Personal Capital vs Mint is one of the common dilemmas among people (particularly moms) who wanted to have the best tool when it comes to tracking their money. Don’t get us wrong though as this one’s a good problem to find a solution to.
Perhaps a lot of you would agree that as women of the house, rather as moms, we are expected to be good at handling money. We are expected to manage the family’s finances in such a way that it gets to the right places every time.
To be able to ensure our money gets to where it’s supposed to be, financial management is key.
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According to the London School of Business and Finance, financial management refers to “the strategic planning, organizing, directing, and controlling of financial undertakings”. You see, from this definition alone, it can get really overwhelming.
Admittedly, with so much on our plate, tracking down where the money goes can be a little daunting at times, which is why personal finance management tools like Personal Capital and Mint are a great help.
But what are these really? Personal Capital vs Mint, which one is better?
Well, the only way to know is to compare what these tools have to offer.
PERSONAL CAPITAL VS MINT: OVERVIEW
Before we get into real comparison and choose whether to go for Personal Capital or Mint, let us first look into what these are in the first place.
PERSONAL CAPITAL
Personal Capital is a free-to-use service that serves as a financial dashboard. While it serves as a way to track expenses, as well as do budgeting for savings, it also helps track your investments. More so, it has incorporation with a list of brokerages.
With these services, it’s obviously more on investing as compared to Mint. Basically, Personal Capital is two services coined into one – a free personal app (as mentioned earlier), and a paid personal finance advisor.
Personal Capital is free to use as they also offer personal finance advisory services, which entitles the user to pay for a fee. This service allows you to talk with a financial advisor to discuss your finances and how to go about growing your money particularly through investing. You may, however, rely also on their suite of free tools that help analyze investments, as well as offering automated financial advice.
You can also use Personal Capital for wealth management, which basically means you give them your money, and they will handle investing it on your behalf (this service spares you a lot from hassles of investing it on your own). This one’s optional though – it all depends on you.
More so, Personal Capital can be used for planning your financial goals for the future. Goals like retirement, buying or building a house, saving for the college fees of your kids, and more. As earlier mentioned, Personal Capital comes with tools that help you analyze your investments, which helps ensure that you are on track.
MINT
Just like Personal Capital, Mint also offers free services. Founded in 2006, Mint has eventually been acquired by Intuit in 2009 and eventually has become the company’s sole focus particularly for personal finance management since 2016.
Mint is very easy to use. In fact, it does not require you to install any local software. Mint is very much accessible with any web browser, as well as mobile devices. More so, the Mint’s website is very user-friendly. You do not have to worry about getting overwhelmed with features.
By using Mint, you get to be worry-free about your personal finances as it can incorporate all of your existing financial accounts like investment accounts, loans, credit cards, as well as your bank accounts. Furthermore, the platform provides you with an entire view of your financial situation in just one site.
That’s definitely convenience at its finest, right?
Before we move on, you may be interested to check this video by Remote Control wherein Eric Worral makes his review on both personal finance management platforms:
PERSONAL CAPITAL VS MINT: COMMONALITIES AND DIFFERENCES
Before looking at the difference between these two platforms, we must first look at the common things between Personal Capital and Mint. After all, finance experts highly recommend both (which made us think there must be something about these two that experts are so into it when it comes to personal finance management).
That said, here are some of the commonalities of Personal Capital and Mint:
| Cash Flow Reporting | Personal Capital and Mint have the ability to track your monthly expenses – specifically where your money goes and what particular categories it goes into. |
| Linking Financial Services | Personal Capital and Mint gives you the ability to link up to thousands of financial institutions like credit cards, loans, personal investments, as well as bank accounts. |
| Email Notifications | Both Personal Capital and Mint send alerts regularly whenever there are changes in your finances. |
Meanwhile, here are the differences between Personal Capital vs Mint:
|
PERSONAL CAPITAL |
|
|
Feature/Tool |
Brief Description |
|
Asset Allocation Target |
This helps you gauge whether you are overweight or underweight in any primary equity categories. |
|
As-Free Service |
Personal Capital does not monetize its service through ad banners or recommended services. |
|
Financial Management |
Through the platform’s paid services (which is optional, by the way), the company can help manage your finances. They can also give investment advice if you want to. |
|
Retirement Planner |
This tool allows you to ensure you are on track towards retirement. It also allows you to play “what if” scenarios to help you decide on things. |
|
401(k) Fee Analyzer |
This tool helps you find out which funds in your retirement plan are costing you a lot, as well as lower your fees. |
|
MINT |
|
|
Feature/Tool |
Brief Description |
|
Budgeting |
Mint allows you to create a budget, at the same time, monitor your cash flow. |
|
Credit Report Monitoring |
This one’s a free service from Mint. It lets you monitor changes in your overall credit score on a quarterly basis. |
|
Mint Credit Monitor |
This one is a paid service. If you want to get a detailed report from the three credit agencies, you may do so for $16.99 per month. |
|
Two-Factor Authentication |
This feature allows you to do two-factor authentication to ensure the security of your personal and sensitive data. |
|
Ways to Save |
This one is an additional feature of Mint. The company gives its recommendations on the different ways you can save money, which you spend through credit cards, insurance, loans, and investment.
This tool is basically where Mint makes its own money. |
PERSONAL CAPITAL VS MINT: COMPARISON
Now it’s time to compare both personal finance tools particularly in the following areas:
- Bill Alerts
- Budgeting
- Customer Service
- Investment Analysis
- Mobile App Access
- Retirement Planning
- Security
- Synchronization
Now let’s start dissecting Personal Capital and Mint on these aspects. Let’s start with…
Bill Alerts
Personal Capital and Mint do both have a feature that lets you know your upcoming bills. However, based on testing, it seems that Mint gets more bill alerts as compared to Personal Capital. Needless to say, it accurately reposts bills that are almost due to the other.
More so, Mint also notifies you through email if you have any other pending bills, which is definitely convenient especially for busy moms like us.
When it comes to bill alerts, as we have said, we have to give it to Mint. They definitely are more reliable. We especially recommend using Mint for the purpose of billing alerts.
Budgeting
Mint is more of a budgeting platform, while Personal Capital is more on the investment side. Mint focuses mainly on managing debts, Millenials, and of course, budgeting. Unlike Personal Capital, Mint’s investment section seems like an addendum.
With Mint, you can breakdown your spending based on categories on its budgeting section. What’s even nice about it is that it allows you to put limits on your spending on a category basis. Also, you can get to see an overview of your financial status, which is great especially if you are tight on your budget. More so, this functionality is available not just on their website, but on their app as well.
Meanwhile, Personal Capital offers a spending tool, which allows you to take note of your spending habits. Also, they give you access to a more detailed list of expenses per each category. Furthermore, they let you set an overall monthly spending goal. However, the tool does not allow you to break it into a category basis like that of Mint.
Unlike Mint, this feature is only available on Personal Capital’s mobile application.
Based on its features or tool available, it is no doubt that when it comes to budgeting, Mint is the clear winner. It comes with a full-featured budgeting functionality that allows the user to access it from both mobile phones and desktop or laptop computers.
As with Personal Capital, it does not offer a full-function budgeting feature. While it allows you to monitor cash flow, it does not give you the ability to set specific spending goals. More so, no offense, but, we thought that Personal Capital’s budgeting feature is overrated.
Customer Service
When it comes to customer service, we have to say that we give it to Personal Capital.
Compared to Mint, users of Personal Capital have not reported any issues when it comes to reaching customer service or resolving problems or issues with their Personal Capital account.
Meanwhile, customer service is, unfortunately, one of the downsides for a lot of Mint users. Well, sad to say, Mint does not have customer service at all. In fact, many Mint users have reported that if you get into problems with Mint’s tools and features, customer support is pretty much useless.
As with Personal Capital, they are very quick to respond to customer concerns. In fact, based on our experience, we get a response from their customer service team in less than 24 hours, which is really commendable.
Investment Analysis
As we have mentioned earlier, Personal Capital is more on the investment part compared to Mint. Thus, we have to give this to Personal Capital. They definitely shine in this area.
With them, you get access to estimated portfolio values, retirement projection, as well as potential variables that may affect your retirement goals. They also offer a personal evaluation to ensure you are on track.
As with Mint, they do not offer any tools on managing investments. Although it does show your portfolio values as time goes, there are no available tools or features to help you with retirement planning or analyzing asset distribution or fund expenditures.
Mobile App Access
Now it’s a battle between Personal Capital app vs Mint.
When it comes to mobile app access, both Personal Capital and Mint are available for Google Android as well as Apple iOS users. However, for every service, some tools or features are exclusive to either the website or the mobile app.
There should be no problem accessing or processing most functions as they are all on the go.
Having said all these, we have to say that both Personal Capital and Mint are ideal particularly to the Millenials who use their mobile phones most of the time as compares to desktop or laptop computers.
Retirement Planning
Unfortunately, Mint does not offer a retirement planning overview. They also do not offer projected portfolio value, as well as any other investment-related tool. Thus, making this a win for Personal Capital.
Personal Capital does have a retirement planning feature. In fact, their recent Retirement Planning tool helps you find out how much you need to save for your retirement needs. And what makes it even more amazing is that it gives you the information in just a few seconds!
To top it all – this feature is definitely free! What more can you ask for, right?
Security
Personal finance management, for us, is such a very important, needless to say, confidential data. That is why we have to make sure to look into both Personal Capital and Mint’s security feature.
With Mint, the company offers a two-factor authentication process, which we highly commend as it ensures the security of your data. Unfortunately, Personal Capital has what they call a “poor man’s version” of security features.
They basically require you to register your computer before being able to use it. More so, you cannot easily log in unless the computer you are using is registered through a PIN sent to you through email or phone call.
Both services are read-only, which means the user is not allowed to perform transactions like transferring cash out of your checking account through the services. Also, the data they download does not include any account number or other recognizable information if in case your account is compromised.
Meanwhile, both Personal Capital and Mint apps allow fingerprint to login on iOS devices. For this area, we have to say that Mint wins over Personal Capital.
Synchronization
When it comes to synchronization, we have to give it to Personal Capital.
Personal Capital uses Yodlee to sync up financial services. Based on data, there are fewer reported synchronization issues among Personal Capital users.
Meanwhile, Mint uses Intuit’s synchronization service. Although when it started, it did use Yodlee as well. However, Intuit switched to their own internal systems when they bought Mint. Possibly, this happens to help them save on costs.
With that, Mint uses its in-house system in synchronizing financial institutions. Compared to Personal Capital, this means they are very unreliable. In fact, there are reports that synchronization stops working in several cases.
Definitely, with Personal Capital’s use of Yodlee in performing syncing, there is a more stable service.
However, regardless of the tool they use for synchronization, one thing’s sure – both companies can sync up with a similar number of financial services.
PERSONAL CAPITAL VS MINT: THE VERDICT
Personal Capital vs Mint, which one is the best? That’s the question that we intend to answer in this review.
We have to say that it’s very hard to compare as both Personal Capital and Mint do have their own ups and downs.
For instance, when it comes to budgeting and bill pay, Personal Capital loses. Mint, however, wins and definitely excels in this side of the fence.
When it comes to customer service, Personal Capital is on top of Mint. They do have a very excellent customer service. More so, Personal Capital also excels in the retirement planning aspect, as well as investing features.
To be honest, Personal Capital and Mint are not opposing personal finance platforms. They both offer different things – and they excel in different aspects.
As we have earlier mentioned, Personal Capital is more of an investment platform with very limited budgeting or billing capacity. As with Mint, it is more of a budgeting platform with very minimal investment support.
You see, they both offer totally different functionalities.
Having pointed all that, we have to say that you can actually use both for different purposes. You may use Mint as your budgeting tool, while using Personal Capital for your investment needs. Since both Personal Capital and Mint are cloud-based, all the more that you can use both platforms simultaneously.
FINAL THOUGHTS ON PERSONAL CAPITAL VS MINT
You know, what’s nice about living in this era is the fact that digital technology makes life so much easier – including handling our personal finances.
If you come to think about it, both Personal Capital and Mint are great tools to keep you on track not just on budgeting or saving, but also in your investments particularly for your retirement needs.
As we have said, there is no battle between Personal Capital vs Mint because they both offer totally different things, which are useful. Thus recommending to use both instead – one for your budgeting needs, and the other for your investments.
Now, have you tried Personal Capital or Mint yet? What can you say about these personal finance management platforms? Do you agree with our thought about these two?
Well, we just have to say that when it comes to choosing Personal Capital vs Mint, it will all depend on you and your needs.
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