TL;DR: I’ve found that tracking my investments over multiple accounts is easiest through the tool, Personal Capital. It is the best at keeping your account information up-to-date and has the fewest problems connecting to new accounts and staying connected as well as letting you specify assets in the account if it is not able to connect. It helps me in seeing my allocation in different sectors across my accounts and allows me to rebalance every 6 months with ease.
If you’re like me, and you have a diversified portfolio for retirement spread across two or more accounts, you’ve probably looked into different solutions to track performance across those accounts. Unfortunately, every solution that I’ve tried falls short in one area or another in providing a comprehensive picture of your overall financial health. However, the one tool that I have found the most useful is Personal Capital. I mainly look at the net worth graphs along with the investment graphs to determine my overall financial standing.
For investing, you can select Investing > Holdings and see how your portfolio compares to the S&P 500 index or the DOW. Switching time frames also shows the last 6 months, 1 year, etc. to show how it’s comparing to those over time. As long as my investments are equal to or greater than all of these indexes, I’m happy with my investment decisions.
I have about 90% of my accounts invested into index funds, and around 10% in individual stocks in the tech sector and that is reflected in the sector allocation graph. If you are unsure about what sectors your funds are in, you can easily see that with this tool. When I need to rebalance due to being too heavy in one sector, I go to whichever account those investments are in, calculate the % allocation that would bring me back into line with my investment targets every 6 months or so, then exchange the funds.
I’ve noticed a lot of talk about holding cash and waiting for a downturn in other investment blogs and podcasts, but ideally you would have an investment allocation that rarely is in cash so that your money is always gaining value and not losing value due to inflation or missing out on another bull market. If you want to take advantage of market upswings, and downturns, you just need to rebalance to do so. If you had a 20% allocation to bonds, and 80% in stocks, but then the stock market goes down by 10%+, you could re-allocate funds from bonds into stocks to get a discount on stock. However, the opposite is also true. If your stock goes up, your allocation into stock would be over 80%, so you could rebalance again, lock in profits from your stocks by selling out of those and buying more bonds to get that back up to 20% allocation. In this sense, you are keeping money aside in bonds instead of just cash and still hopefully keeping pace with inflation.
I also front-load my investments at the start of the year due to my employer doing a 50% match on all contributions that isn’t limited to a certain percent each paycheck. By front-loading my money is in the market longer and can compound more throughout the year while others dollar cost average instead. So in the first few months of the year my investments are really pushing my account balance up and after 6 months I rebalance depending on how those funds are doing. One thing you can do to also rebalance is to change your allocation in your investments throughout the year if you dollar cost average. If you’re like me and you front-load, you only really need to adjust your allocations a couple times a year in the funds you already have invested.
One thing I’ve noticed with looking at the net worth value, if you have your property included with the Zillow estimate it can really affect the value quite a bit depending on how your real estate market is doing. If selling your property and downsizing into a smaller house is not part of your retirement plan, you might want to skip adding your property to Personal Capital and just track your investments and other debt and cash accounts instead.
Hopefully this was insightful in how I use Personal Capital for investment tracking and rebalancing, and gives you some ideas in what you can do for your investing journey! If you want to try out Personal Capital, please use my referral link!