In modern day, managing your income, outcome, and investment are getting easier with the help of various financial apps like Clarity Money Vs Personal Capital. They are capable of collecting the data from your activities and providing an image of how you spend them for different decision making such as saving more, reducing spend, or changing investment type. While these apps are useful, they also offer different powers and before you sign up in one, let’s see what you can expect from their services here.
In this article, we are going to give you information about:
- How to Choose a Budgeting App
- What are Clarity Money and Personal Capital
- How Many Accounts Clarity Money and Personal Capital can Gather
- Do Clarity Money and Personal Capital Allow for Personalization
- What Else Clarity Money and Personal Capital can offer
- Clarity Money Vs Personal Capital
Contents
Personal Financial or Budgeting Apps
We spend most of our waking hours almost everyday to work and to build our lives in an attempt to have a better future and overall live comfortably as long as possible. We have income to spend on food and other necessities such as mortgage and other bills but money is something very difficult to manage. Its ability to get you various things more often than not stray into products and services that are not currently needed or not important to improve your life. Read also: Everydollar vs Mint.
Some people can be very strict when spending their hard-earned money and many others are finding it very difficult to spare some for savings. With the advance in technology, we don’t need to pay for a personal finance advisor anymore just to plan our spending and get an image on how well we manage our income. There are so many new financial software out there and while in general they can provide you with some useful information regarding your habit, not all are made the same.
Here are some factors that you may want to consider first when looking for a financial app to help you make decision faster, manage your income, or other financial goals that you need to achieve:
- Service cost is probably the first part you see whenever choosing an app, especially those that come with certain personalized features. Financial apps don’t need to be expensive because many of them are free. Chances are they will offer you a premium version which adds even more features for convenient or extra capabilities that will ease your transaction or information regarding decision making.
- Account restriction is also important as not all services will allow you to add unlimited accounts and for those who are going to enter lots of cards or accounts to maintain, make sure the service is allowing you to include all of them for a better view of your habit.
- Spending reports is probably what most people want from a financial app because it is indeed easier to see a graphic or chart with our spending information in it. Usually these apps will compile all of your spending and break them down per category which can be customized or fixed to give you necessary information on how we spend the money.
- Human support is something premium and you will most likely need to pay to talk to their financial advisor. This is offered by some apps and best if you have medium to large accounts to manage as we can ask professionals about what decision to make.
About Clarity Money and Personal Capital
Financial apps are getting more and more widely used because of how easy to use and how convenient they are, especially for the free version as you have moved from the confusing and cluttering notebook into a more pleasant to see and neat app. They are great for people who want to get an idea or the bigger image of their spending so they can make a better decision especially on improving the spending or investing.
Since many of them are free as well, we don’t need to spend a dime to get the whole experience but usually there are some limitations in case you want more from the app. Among those popular financial apps today, Clarity Money and Personal Capital are two good options to consider. First is probably because they are free thus, people are more interested to try their services but digging deeper, they are much more helpful. What you may need is only the basic functions.
Clarity Money is relatively new compared to Personal Capital and this app is just around 4 years now in 2020 while the latter has been here for almost a decade already. The age of a company and how long they have been operating is a sign whether we can trust them or not so people may be more comfortable with a matured company as they have more experience. Both of them are similar but not exactly the same.
Most people who are familiar with Personal Capital probably know them for the investment analytic since they take care of your investment as well but, they actually have another side of free features that you can use to manage your income and spending. Clarity Money is another amazing app in our opinion and while they are not yet as popular as the latter, their main idea of organizing all of your transactions in one place is actually very brilliant but, it is not one size fits all.
Clarity Money and Personal Capital Accounts and Graphs
As a financial management app, both of them will collect data from your accounts to be used as a basis to project the information as well as giving you suggestions that seem fit with your spending habit and goals. You can put almost any accounts here which we believe the number is not restricted since most of us will only have several. Overall you can enter checking and credit accounts in the app and from here we can see the transaction in the form of graphs.
Their transaction graphs are actually very similar to each other and the visual is also easy to understand with daily trend and pie charts. What’s different is Clarity Money designed to be more smartphone centered so their placement and layout are optimized this way but both can be accessed from the browser as well if it is more comfortable.
Clarity Money and Personal Capital Spending Category
One of the most important parts of financial management is tracking your spending and both Clarity Money and Personal Capital are doing it for you for free by categorizing your spending into different groups. What’s different here is that you can customize it depending on your personal preference while CS doesn’t give you this option. They surely put the spending into their respectable groups but not very details to our liking. For example the vehicle maintenance is put under shopping and bills category together with utilities and even childcare.
For some people this may not be a problem and it is not an issue as well if you feel their way of grouping your spending is accurate but personally we want to have different groups based on what the money is used for which is offered by Personal Capital.
Clarity Money and Personal Capital Additional Features
Linking accounts and categorizing your spending are two main benefits of financial apps but to attract users, they have to be different as well and this is where Clarity Money is shining best in our opinion. If other apps are not allowing an account automatically drawing money from another account for safety purposes, this one does. It is meant for saving which is apparently non-interest-bearing and it is with Wells Fargo. For example, we set a certain amount to be pulled from one of our cards for a goal.
This function has two sides to it, the good side is it can automate your saving so overall we can be more consistent about allocating some. The not so good side is the safety risk since they don’t provide much information about this account which can be a red flag for many prospective users. Another interesting feature from this app is their negotiation function which can save you some money as well. Their service will negotiate to decrease some of your bills on the user’s behalf and if successful, they will take 1/3 of it as commission.
For Personal Capital, they have this 401(k) Analyzer tool which will help you to see the exact amount of what fund in your listed plan is actually costing you and if they find a better option, then the recommendation will be given as well. This is very useful as we often don’t pay full attention to sponsored retirement plans and what fees hide under those plans. They also have this “what if” scenario which is also very useful as it can help you see whether you are on track for your plan or not.
This scenario is counting the changes in your life for example if you have changed your career or moved from one job to another and currently expecting a child or even saving for your kid’s college. All of these factors are considered to predict the impact in your long term plan.
Clarity Money vs Personal Capital
Both of these apps are very useful if you are wondering where the money goes or just want to be convenient when making their financial decision. The prominent differences between Clarity Money and Personal Capital in our opinion is that the latter is more suitable for budgeting and planner because it overall covers all of your needs including investment and more detailed about the way they show data. Clarity Money on the other hand is good for those who want to compile all of their accounts in a single platform.
| Clarity Money | Personal Capital |
|---|---|
| - All-inclusive budgeting | - Track wealth and spending |
| - Inter-account transaction | - Personalized customization |
| - In-app saving functions | - Investment advice |
| - Not ideal for investor | - Not for bridging accounts |
Conclusion
Not all apps are made for the same type of users and you can always choose the one that fits you the most. Since they are free, we recommend trying and seeing yourself whether their service works for your preference or if you need to look somewhere else but, for those who are managing their investment as well, Personal Capital is the most ideal option.