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12 Best Quicken Alternatives for 2023 (#1 is Free)

December 22, 2022 by Rob Berger

Some of the links in this article may be affiliate links, meaning at no cost to you I earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase or open an account. I only recommend products or services that I (1) believe in and (2) would recommend to my mom. Advertisers have had no control, influence, or input on this article, and they never will.

Quicken was once the go-to budgeting tool. I used it when it was first released in the 1980s. Today, it's been eclipsed by apps that enable you to manage every aspect of your finances, often for free. Here are the best Quicken alternatives to consider as near 2023.

Quicken alternatives
Options to replace Quicken

Editor's Top Picks

Of all the options out there to replace Quicken (and Mint for that matter), three stand out among the rest:

  1. Personal Capital–Now Called the Empower Personal Dashboard (Empower bought Personal Capital 2020), it's still free and comes with the a robust set of features unmatched by other alternatives. It easily handles budgeting, net worth, cash flow, retirement investments and taxable investments. It also comes with excellent tools, including a retirement calculator, investment fee analyzer and investment portfolio analyzer. Personal Capital can now even track Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and thousands of other tokens. It's the tool I use every day.
  2. Tiller–If you are a diehard spreadsheet fanatic, Tiller is the answer. It integrates with Google Sheets and can connect your bank accounts and credit cards. It also offers daily email updates to track your spending. You can try it free for 30 days, then it's $79 a year. I've used it for the past two years and love it.
  3. YNAB (You Need a Budget): For those who want to focus exclusively on budgeting (no investments), then YNAB is an ideal choice. It does budgeting as well as any app available today, and its community is second to none. While I no longer use YNAB, I did for years and found it to be an effective budgeting tool.
Quicken Alternatives
  • 1. Personal Capital (Empower)–Editor's Choice
  • 2. Tiller Money–Best Spreadsheet Budget Tool
  • 3. Monarch Money–Best for Couples
  • 4. You Need a Budget (YNAB)–Best for Budgeting
  • 5. PocketSmith–Best for Calendar Budgeting
  • 6. CountAbout–Imports from Quicken or Mint
  • 7. Moneydance–Traditional Budgeting Software
  • 8. EveryDollar (now Ramsey+)–Best for Dave Ramsey Fans
  • 9. Banktivity–Designed for Macs Only
  • 10. GnuCash–Best for Small Businesses
  • 11. Mint–Best Mobile App
  • 12. GoodBudget–Best for Envelope Budgeting

Top Quicken Alternatives

1. Personal Capital (Empower)–Editor's Choice

Empower is the clear winner when it comes to finding a substitute for Quicken. It's free and it offers tools to manage every aspect of your finances. With Empower, you can link just about every financial account you have–checking, savings, credit cards, retirement accounts, investments accounts, HSAs, and even your home (via Zillow).

Empower Budgeting

Once linked, Empower's financial dashboard offers valuable insights into your finances. As an example, the tool enables you to–

  • Track your spending by category
  • Estimate when you can retire
  • Calculate the cost of your investments
  • View the asset allocation of your portfolio
  • Generate a net worth statement
  • Get alerts when bills are due
  • Evaluate your investment portfolio
  • Save for emergencies
  • Track Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and thousands of other tokens without giving access to your crypto wallet.

I've used Empower for years. It's the only option that in my opinion can handle every aspect of my finances, from budgeting to investing to retirement planning.

Try Personal Capital (Empower)

I've written a detailed review and guide of Personal Capital that you can check out.

2. Tiller Money–Best Spreadsheet Budget Tool

I don't know how they do it, but Tiller Money has figured out how to turn a Google Sheet into a dynamic budgeting tool. You link your bank accounts and credit cards to Tiller's Google Sheet tool, and it automatically downloads all of your transactions. From there you can create budgets, categorize spending and generate reports.

TillerMoney - Quicken Alternative

I've been using Tiller for about two years for both my personal budget and my small business budget. Tiller is ideal for those who love working with spreadsheets. I will caution you that setting up Tiller can be a bit daunting. The good news is that they have videos to walk you through each step. If I can do it, you can do it.

One thing to keep in mind is that you must manually categorize each transaction. For some, this is a show-stopper. They want the convenience of tools like Personal Capital that automate this process. For others, they would prefer to categorize transactions themselves. It forces them to look at each entry, understand how they spent money, and then properly categorize the expense. Tiller does offer an auto-category tool that you can use to automatically categorize transactions based on the description.

With Tiller, you can also have your transactions downloaded to an Excel spreadsheet. This is an ideal approach for those who don't want to keep their financial data in the cloud.

There is no right or wrong here. It comes down to preference. You get a 30-day free trial. After that Tiller costs $79 a year.

3. Monarch Money–Best for Couples

Monarch Money shares many of the features in the apps listed above. You can connect all your accounts, including investment and loan accounts. Once connected, Monarch syncs your accounts to generate your net worth. The app enables you to see all your transactions in one place, set financial goals, and customize your financial dashboard.

Monarch Money Dashboard

Monarch is ideal for couples because of its collaboration features. Invite someone to your Monarch account with a separate login. They can view your data and connect their own accounts. This feature is particularly useful for couples that keep separate accounts, but want to understand their combined financial picture.

Try Monarch Money for free for 7 days, then as little as $7.50 a month.

4. You Need a Budget (YNAB)–Best for Budgeting

YNAB is ideal for those looking just for a budgeting tool. In my view, there is no better app when it comes to creating a budget. YNAB's interface is similar to a spreadsheet. The tool makes it easy to budget by category based on the money you actually have in the bank.

YNAB budgeting alternative to Quicken

One of YNAB's core principles is to give every dollar a job. You do that by deciding how you'll spend every dollar that enters your checking account. As with other tools, you can connect your bank accounts and credit cards to YNAB. This allows for real-time updates so that you can track your spending throughout the month.

YNAB doesn't have the rich feature set offered by Personal Capital. That's particularly clear when it comes to investing. For those who don't want to track investments, however, YNAB is a good option.

It's not free, however. You can try it free for 34 days. After that it costs $14.99 a month or $99 a year for the annual plan. The cost is the biggest downside to YNAB.

5. PocketSmith–Best for Calendar Budgeting

PocketSmith started out as a calendar to plan upcoming income and expenses. Today, it's a full-fledged budgeting app. You can synch your accounts with PocketSmith. Once synced, you can track your budget and you're net worth. You can also see your income and spending in a handy calendar view.

PocketSmith

One stand-out feature is PocketSmith's auto-budget tool. It can create a budget for you based on past spending. It also has a cash flow feature that maps income and spending by date range.

While there is a free version of PocketSmith, it requires manual data entry. To get automatic bank fees, you'll need to pay at least $9.95 a month, or $7.50 a month when paid annually.

6. CountAbout–Imports from Quicken or Mint

If you have a lot of data in Quicken (or Mint), CountAbout may be the budgeting tool for you. It has a feature enabling you to import data from Quicken or Mint.

CountAbout Quicken alternative

CountAbout enables you to download transactions from your bank and customize both income and expense categories. You can even attach receipt images to expense transactions. You can set up recurring transactions and generate financial reports.

For the features you get, the cost is very reasonable. The basic plan costs just $9.99 a year (not a month). If you want automatic downloading of bank transactions, the cost is $39.99 a year.

7. Moneydance–Traditional Budgeting Software

With so many apps going online, Moneydance takes a different approach. You download Moneydance software rather than use it online. Once downloaded, the software works much like you would expect.

You can download banking transactions into the software and initiate bill pay. The software automatically categorizes expenses based on how you categorize them. In other words, it learns from your use of the program.

Moneydance Quicken alternative

It offers a dashboard (shown above) that summarizes your finances all in one place. It can also generate reports and graphs to give you a visual perspective of your money. It comes with a mobile app, can track your finances, and can alert you when bills are due.

It costs $49.99 and is available for both Mac and Windows.

8. EveryDollar (now Ramsey+)–Best for Dave Ramsey Fans

For those Dave Ramsey founds out there, EveryDollar may be a good substitute for Intuit's Quicken. Now the first thing to point out is that EveryDollar ain't cheap. After a 14-day trial, you'll pay $99.99 a year (down from $129.99). If you want to pay month-to-month, the cost is $12,99 per month. For this reason, it's not high on my list. Still, I know that some folks are passionate about Financial Peace University.

You can sync your bank accounts with the tool, set up budgets, and track spending. The budgeting app works on both computers, smartphones and tablets. It also comes with Dave's educational materials, enabling you to take online course and join virtual groups.

9. Banktivity–Designed for Macs Only

Banktivity is the budgeting app specifically designed for Macs. It offers features that enable you to organize and track all of your finances. You can group accounts and reports, and organize the dashboard in a way that works best for you.

Banktivity

Banktivity enables you to follow an envelope budget. This can be ideal for those living paycheck-to-paycheck.

You can import transactions from your bank and sync data across all of your Mac devices. Banktivity also tracks investments and offers account-level reporting. You can try Banktivity for free for 30 days. After that they offer three plans ranging in price from $4.16 to $8.33 a month (billed annually).

10. GnuCash–Best for Small Businesses

For those who tracked business income and expenses with Quicken and a reluctant to move up to Quickbooks, GnuCash may be the answer. It uses double-entry accounting, ideal for businesses and accounting nerds, like me. It tracks investments, schedules transactions, and generates reports and graphs.

GnuCash

11. Mint–Best Mobile App

I used Mint when it first came out more than a decade ago. Today, many are looking for Mint alternatives, including several of the apps listed here. Still, Mint is a worth consideration if you are replacing Intuit's Quicken. It's free, for starters. It's easy to link your accounts and track your spending. It includes a budget planner and credit score tracker. Of course, there are great Mint alternatives as well.

Mint.com

12. GoodBudget–Best for Envelope Budgeting

I'm old enough to remember the envelope method of budgeting. My mom used it. When the money in the grocery envelope ran out, we stopped going to the grocery story until payday (seriously). Today, the envelope budget is still a smart way to manage money for those living paycheck-to-paycheck. If you want a digital version of the time-tested budgeting system, give GoodBudget a try.

Goodudget

Goodudget is an app based on the envelope system. You can sync and share your budget, and set goals to save for big purchases. It also has tools that let you track and payoff your debt.

Quicken Alternatives FAQs

What is the best free alternative to Quicken?

Personal Capital (Empower) is the best free Quicken replacement. It comes with nearly every feature Quicken offers, and money additional tools. It's particularly well suited for those who want to manage all of their money in one place, including investments.

Is Quicken available without a subscription?

Sadly, no. Like so many other software packages and apps, Quicken is now only available as a subscription. As a result, you must pay for Quicken every year.

What is the best option to migrate Quicken data to new app?

If you want to migrate Quicken data to a new budgeting app, CountAbout is a solid option. It has features enabling users to migrate data from Quicken or Mint.

What is the best Quicken replacement for calendar budgeting?

PocketSmith is a good choice as it offers a calendar view of your budget.

Which Quicken alternatives allow you to schedule bill payments?

With both Tiller Money and YNAB, you can plan future bill payments. Tiller offers a Bill Payment Tracker template and YNAB enables you to allocate funds to bills you plan to pay in the future.

What is the best free alternative to Quicken?

There are only a few free alternatives to Quicken. The best in my view is Personal Capital (Empower), as noted above. Its combination of features, ease of use, and user interface make it my top pick.

Whatever tool you choose, the key is to pick one that works for you. For me, that's Personal Capital (Empower). One or more of the above Quicken alternatives, however, should suit the needs of most looking to better manage their money.

Filed Under: Tools, Investing

ProjectionLab Review – Financial Planning Software

November 28, 2022 by Rob Berger and Kevin Mercadante

Some of the links in this article may be affiliate links, meaning at no cost to you I earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase or open an account. I only recommend products or services that I (1) believe in and (2) would recommend to my mom. Advertisers have had no control, influence, or input on this article, and they never will.

ProjectionLab is a financial simulator that will help you work out the mechanics of financial planning. It enables you to enter your current financial profile and future projections, then determine when you’ll reach your goals. But it does more than that. It allows you to change inputs and assumptions to account for contingencies and changes in life.

On balance, ProjectionLab is an excellent tool to help you reach your financial independence or retirement goal.

Since space is limited, and this product has so many different moving parts, I’m going to do this review in something more like a summary fashion. If you’d like a more detailed analysis of the ProjectionLab service, you can check out this YouTube video, ProjectionLab Review | Financial Planning Software.

ProjectionLab QuickTake

  • Crunches the numbers to help you reach retirement or financial independence
  • Flexible platform that enables you to run virtually unlimited scenarios
  • Accounts for the life variables that can have a material effect on your retirement plans
  • Focuses on both the accumulation and withdrawal of wealth in pursuing your financial goals
  • Realistic simulations and variables based on real world assumptions

About ProjectionLab

ProjectionLab is a financial planning simulator designed to help you analyze and project your ability to reach financial independence or retirement. It was designed to help you simulate your financial future and run various scenarios to understand the best way to reach your goals.

ProjectionLab was founded by creator Kyle Nolan, under ProjectionLab LLC, based in Boston. The service was initially rolled out in April, 2021, and is admittedly something of a work-in-progress. But Kyle has continued to improve and update the product, both to incorporate a wider range of information and to improve the user experience.

Because ProjectionLab is new and still being developed, no third-party information is available. The company has not been rated by the Better Business Bureau or Trustpilot, and since no mobile app is yet available, there are no user ratings from either Google Play or The App Store.

But even in the absence of third-party information and ratings, my own experience shows this service to be one well worth investigating. It provides comprehensive and useful strategies and projections to help you reach your future financial goals.

Customer service is available by email only, at [email protected] 

ProjectionLab Review

How ProjectionLab Works

Setup

If you want to sample ProjectionLab, you can simply click the “Try for Free” link in the text just above the three Pricing & Subscriptions section on the main page of the website. You’ll be given a choice of either a Normal Walkthrough or Sandbox Mode. Normal Walkthrough is the more detailed of the two, enabling you to fill in your own data as part of the tour.

ProjectionLab Setup

After you click the Continue button, you’ll be brought to the Setup screen, where you’ll enter basic information:

ProjectionLab About You

The next screen will ask you the question “Which of these do you have today?” The choices will be savings, investments, real assets, and debt. You can choose whichever apply to your financial situation.

ProjectionLab Assets and Liabilities

On subsequent screens, you’ll be asked to fill in balances for each of the four categories. You can add multiple accounts within each category.

The investment screen will provide multiple boxes to check that will include taxable investments, various retirement plans, health savings accounts, 529 plans, and even cryptocurrencies. You can click and complete the information for any and all investment accounts that apply to your situation. Note that if you list any accounts as joint, the funds will be divided 50/50 between you and your spouse.

ProjectionLab Investment Accounts

After completing the various financial account inputs, you’ll be brought to the Dashboard page. There you’ll find all the information you’ve entered so far.

ProjectionLab Dashboard

Add Plan

Notice at the bottom left-hand side you see the Add Plan box? If you click that, you can begin adding your long-term financial plan. But don’t forget to name your plan in case you want to create more than one (which is exactly what I didn’t do since I’m only doing one plan).

ProjectionLab Financial Plan

ProjectionLab will ask you to input a plan start date, and then to “set up a few milestones”. That’s when you’ll begin entering the ages at which you expect to retire, the end of plan (your anticipated date of death), and how large your portfolio will need to be to reach financial independence.

The latter is determined by a number multiplied times your expected monthly expenses. In the screenshot, 25 is automatically assumed. This is because multiplying 25 times your expected annual expenses will result in what’s commonly referred to as the 4% safe withdrawal rate. And if you look just below that line, there’s also the capability to add additional milestones.

This is the point at which you are defining the parameters in your journey toward financial independence or retirement. And of course, you can always go in and change the dates later.

ProjectionLab Milestones

In this case, we’re expecting retirement at age 60, and living to age 85.

The next input screen asks you to input the anticipated growth rate of your investments, the expected dividend yield, and anticipated rate of inflation. The screen automatically populates, and I believe the numbers presented are fairly accurate. But you can change them if you like or shift over to actual historical market performance.

Investment, Dividend and Inflation Rates

Notice that some of the input lines have an i next to them. By clicking that icon you’ll get detailed information on how the numbers are calculated.

Income

On the next screen, you’ll enter income. 10 different options are provided, and you can check each that apply.

Income Sources

I’ve entered salary, a side hustle, and for retirement, pension income and Social Security. Notice that not only does each contain the expected income, but also the start date and end date. This recognizes for example, that salary will continue from now until retirement, when pension and Social Security will take over. Side hustle is expected to continue for life.

Sources of Income

Next is the all-important input screen, Cash-Flow Priorities. This is where you’ll enter specific spending priorities, like adding to specific asset accounts for paying extra for the payoff of debts. In this case, I’ve chosen to add an additional $200 per month to be paid toward the student loan.

Expenses

The next screen is entitled Expenses, and this is where you list some variable expenses. There’s a long list here:

Expenses

Conspicuously absent from the list is your mortgage. That’s because it’s included when you enter your house as an asset and will already be reflected in your expenses. You can add any other expenses that apply.

ProjectionLab Expenses Summary

You’ll then come to a Real Assets screen, that will enable you to add future purchases. These include another house, a motorcycle, furniture, a car, a boat, or precious metals, among others. You can add any that apply, and ProjectionLab will calculate those into your financial future.

Income Taxes

You’ll be presented with a screen that will give you a predetermined income tax and capital gains tax rates. You can accept those or make changes to percentages that more accurately reflect your tax situation.

ProjectionLab Tax Assumptions

Output

With all the above entered, we come to an output screen that’s set up as a graph. Based on the input we’ve provided, it shows we’ll reach $1,248,887 in net worth by retirement at age 60. That number will approximately remain constant until the end of life, which means we are not in danger of outliving our money.

ProjectionLab Timeline

Now, those are just the results from setting up a single plan. Not only can you change the input and assumptions and come up with new simulations, but you can also develop additional plans, and compare them. That will give you an opportunity to choose which strategy will work best for you.

Advanced Options

On the top bar of the Dashboard is the Advanced tab. If you click on that, several options will display that will include Monte Carlo Simulation, Withdrawal Strategy, Cash Flow, Compare, and Notes.

The Monte Carlo Simulation is particularly interesting, because it allows you to do up to 94 simulations, each with different input assumptions. It then provides the rate of success in each scenario. For example, it may show an 89.4 % likelihood a simulated plan will be successful, meaning you won’t run out of money before the end of your life.

ProjectionLab Monte Carlo Simulation

This is one of the features of ProjectionLab I find to be most attractive. It gives an opportunity to evaluate the viability of any strategy you run for the simulation, reducing it to a single percentage that makes it easy to compare with other simulations.

Also interesting is the Withdrawal Strategy. You can establish a distribution order outlining which accounts you will begin drawing funds from first. For example, you can set up a hierarchy that includes cash-on-hand first, followed by savings, cryptocurrencies, taxable investments, then finally retirement plans.

PROS

  • Helps project & prepare for financial independence or retirement
  • Flexible platform to accommodate multiple scenarios
  • Flexible low-cost plans + free version
  • No ads, no calls and no selling of your data

CONS

  • New service still working out the bugs
  • Customer support by email only
  • Tax analysis limited

ProjectionLab Plan Pricing & Sign Up

Plan Pricing

ProjectionLab offers three different plans, Basic, Premium and Pro. There are as many as three pricing levels for each plan. If you pay the subscription fee annually, the monthly cost works out as follows:

ProjectionLab Pricing

You can also choose a straight up monthly payment plan. For the Premium plan, the monthly fee will be $12, and $60 for the Pro plan. Be aware that the Pro plan is designed for financial advisors and coaches, who will use it for multiple client profiles. If you are only going to use ProjectionLab for your own purposes, you can use either Basic or Premium.

It’s important to understand the Basic plan will enable you to create simulations, but it does not save data. You’ll need to sign up for the Premium plan to save data, which makes it a logical choice between the three plans offered.

Note also that both paid versions come with a 7-day trial to give you an opportunity to try out the product. If you cancel your subscription at any time within the first seven days, your credit card on file will not be charged.

The third option is available only on the Premium plan. For a one-time payment of $450, you’ll have lifetime access to the service for your own personal use. (The lifetime payment option is not available for the Pro plan.)

Sign Up

If you want to sign up with ProjectionLab you can do so directly from the website by clicking the Start Now or Start Trial buttons under one of the three plans. Once you do, you’ll be asked to create an account, which you can do either by signing up with Google or with Email.

I went for the monthly Premium plan with Google, and it requested my Google email address. Next, I was asked to supply my ZIP Code.

In the very next screen, I was asked to indicate adding a credit card or PayPal, so it’s clear you’ll need to add a payment method to get the 7-day free trial.

Signing up for the actual service will give you the best and longest free look at the service. If you’re not satisfied, you can cancel your order within seven days and your card will not be charged.

ProjectionLab Alternative

Empower is a wealth management service that also offers a free financial aggregator, where you can connect all your financial accounts in one place. And while it doesn’t provide the depth of financial simulations that ProjectionLab does, it does offer its Portfolio and New Worth trackers, as well as Retirement Planner and a Retirement Savings Planner to help you reach your long-term financial goals. Again, the platform is free to use, and you’ll pay only for the Wealth Management service if you choose to take advantage of it.

Final Thoughts

ProjectionLab is an excellent service to help you if your goal is retirement, early retirement, or financial independence. And since the cost is no more than $96 per year for the Premium version, it won’t take a big bite out of the funds you’re trying to save to help you reach your goal.

ProjectionLab is fairly numbers-intensive, and best designed for those who like to crunch a lot of numbers when it comes to finance. If this doesn’t describe you, the service may be a bit overwhelming, and you may be better served using the free version of Empower as an alternative.

ProjectionLab Review Rating

ProjectionLab

Kevin Mercadante

Ease of Use
Cost
Customer Support
Functionality
User Interface

Summary

Financial planning simulator to assist you with planning for financial independence or retirement.Free Basic version, $8/month for the Premium plan, $40/month for the Pro plan.

4.3

Filed Under: Tools

10 Ways to Protect Your Financial Accounts from Hackers

September 27, 2021 by Rob Berger

Some of the links in this article may be affiliate links, meaning at no cost to you I earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase or open an account. I only recommend products or services that I (1) believe in and (2) would recommend to my mom. Advertisers have had no control, influence, or input on this article, and they never will.

According to one study, cybercrime will cost the world $10.5 trillion a year by 2025. Today, every financial account from banks to credit cards to investments offer online access. For investors, the risk of loss from cybercrime ranks as the #1 concern.

Fortunately, there are steps we can all take to increase our online security. For very little money, we can significantly reduce the likelihood that a computer hacker will gain access to our financial accounts. Here are 10 steps you can take to help secure your online accounts.

10 Tips for Securing Your Online Accounts

1. Use a Password Manager

I have four rules when it comes to passwords:

  1. Change passwords regularly
  2. Never use the same password twice
  3. Use 16 character passwords (or longer)
  4. Passwords should contain upper case letters, lower case letters, numbers and symbols

LMG Security, a cybersecurity and digital forensics services company, notes that an 8-character password can be cracked in about 8 hours, while a 16-character password would take 6.5 trillion years.

The problem with the above rules is that it makes it impossible to memorize all of your passwords. The answer is to use a password manager. My tool of choice is LastPass.

With LastPass you can create widely complicated passwords for all of your online accounts. The passwords are never saved on the LastPass services (they encrypt and decrypt them at the local level–your computer). It can be used on mobile devices, and it even enables you to share sign-on credentials with friends and family (if you want to) without revealing your password.

2. Use VPN

VPN, short for Virtual Private Network, does two really important things to you secure when browsing the internet. First, it encrypts the data sent to and from your browser or app. Second, it hides your IP address. These two features allow you to surf the internet securely and anonymously.

Using a VPN is a must on any public network (coffee shop, hotel, etc.). I use it at home as well. There's no need for my internet service provider to harvest my internet data. Internet service providers are allowed to sell data about our internet usage. A VPN blocks that data.

My VPN of choice is NordVPN. NordVPN can be used on any device, is easy to set up, and is reasonably priced.

NordVPN: Save 73% w/ 2-Year Plan

3. Set Up Two-Factor Authentication

Two-factor Authentication (2FA) adds an extra layer of protection to your username and password. To log into an account, you'll need to enter a secure code, sometimes referred to as a one-time password (OTP). The OTP is sent via text or email, or through an app such as Google Authenticator, depending on how the financial institution has set up its 2FA.

I use 2FA on every online account that makes it available, including email accounts. While it adds an extra step to logging into an account, the security it provides is priceless. According to a 2019 Microsoft study, 2FA blocks 99.9% of the attacks on an account.

4. Change your Security Questions

Many websites use security questions to verify your identity. Many of these questions ask for information that in theory only you would know. Common examples include your mother's maiden name and your place of birth. The problem is that hackers can get this information, too.

A good friend of mine recently had $150,000 taken from his line of credit. The hackers called the bank and “verified” their identity by correctly answering his security questions. They found the information online. The only thing that saved him was a call from the bank when the hackers tried to wire the money out of his account.

For this reason, I no longer use common security questions. I make sure that the question and answer include information that cannot be found online. If need be, I make up the answers and keep the information stored securely at home (LastPass can store this information for you as well).

5. Set up Alerts

Financial accounts allow you to set up text or email alerts. I use this for any transactions on bank accounts and investment accounts. In this way, I get an instant alert any time money is transferred from an account. On investment accounts, I get notice of a transaction before it's completed. This gives me time to contact the brokerage firm if I didn't authorize the transaction.

6. Don't Click Links in Emails

Be very suspicious of links in emails. If I receive an email purportedly from a financial institution, I rarely click the link. Instead, I'll log into my account to deal with whatever the issue is. And if need be, I'll call the bank or brokerage firm.

7. Don't Call Phone Numbers in Emails

Speaking of calling a financial institution, I never call the number in an email. Instead, I call the number on the bank of my credit or debit card. For brokerage firms, I call the number on my statement or the firm's website. A phone number in an email may not be legitimate.

8. Only Download Apps from App Stores

For apps on a smartphone or tablet, only download them from the Apple or Android app stores. This insures you are downloading legitimate apps that have been approved by the respective platforms.

9. Set up Ability to Track and Wipe Your Phone

Make sure you have the ability to locate your phone and wipe the data from it. This is important if your phone is ever lost or stolen. I had my phone stolen at a chess tournament of all places many years ago. Fortunately, I was able to wipe the data from the phone. It's also important to password protect your phone, too.

10. Use Antivirus Software

Finally, it's important to use antivirus software on your PC and, yes, even your Mac. These tools help detect and remove any malicious code on your computer.

For PCs, my favorite is NortonLifeLock. You can purchase just the Norton Antivirus software, or add LifeLock protection as well. For Macs, Norton also offers an antivirus solution. There are other options, some free. Whatever you choose, it's important to project your computers with antivirus software.

Bonus Tip: Consider keeping your investments in more than one brokerage. If you have a 401k, it's likely at a different financial institution than your IRA, although not always. And when you retire, it's common to consolidate all of your assets at one place. While this is convenient, I'm much more comfortable splitting our assets among two or more brokerage firms.

Final Thoughts

Computer hacking is a reality we all confront. By tacking a few simple steps, however, we can significantly increase the protection of our online accounts, making it much harder for hackers to gain access. A password manager and VPN are a must, as is setting up 2FA. These steps along can prevent the vast majority of problems.

Filed Under: Technology, Personal Finance, Tools

Empower Review and User’s Guide (Update for 2023)

June 14, 2021 by Rob Berger

Some of the links in this article may be affiliate links, meaning at no cost to you I earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase or open an account. I only recommend products or services that I (1) believe in and (2) would recommend to my mom. Advertisers have had no control, influence, or input on this article, and they never will.

Empower is a financial tool that enables you to manage 100% of your finances from a single dashboard. Previously called Personal Capital, I've used the app for years. In this Empower review and user's guide, I'll walk through all of its features and how to leverage them to help you make the most of your money.

Table Of Contents
  1. Getting Started with Empower
    • Linking Your Accounts
    • Settings & Profile
    • Dashboard
    • Net Worth
  2. Empower Banking
    • Cash Flow
    • Budgeting
    • Bills
  3. Empower Investing
    • Holdings
    • Allocation
    • Tracking Bitcoin & Crypto
  4. Empower Planning
    • Retirement Planner
    • Savings Planner
      • Retirement Savings Planner
      • Emergency Fund Savings Planner
      • Debt Paydown Planner
    • Retirement Fee Analyzer
    • Investment Fee Checkup
  5. Empower FAQs
    • Is Empower safe?
    • Is Empower really free?
    • Will Empower call me?
    • Do I have to invest with Empower to use the dashboard?
    • How much does Empower cost?
      • Update

This article contains references to products from one or more of our advertisers. We may receive compensation when you click on links to those products. The opinions and views expressed, however, are our own.

Update

Personal Capital is now called Empower, and the free tool is now called the Empower Personal Dashboard. Nothing about the tool has changed, and it's still free.

Getting Started with Empower

The first step is to sign up for a free account. Then you want to connect all of your financial accounts. While Empower is perhaps best known for analyzing and tracking investments, I also connect all of my bank accounts, credit cards, loans, mortgage, and even my home. You can add your home and Empower will pull in the value from Zillow.

Get Empower for Free

Linking Your Accounts

Over the years I've linked may of the following types of accounts to Empower:

  • Bank Accounts (checking, savings, CDs, money market accounts)
  • Retirement Accounts (401k, 403b, TSP, IRA, among others)
  • Non-Retirement Investment Accounts
  • HSA
  • Credit Cards
  • Mortgage
  • Student Loans
  • Personal Loans

You can link just about any financial account for which you have online access. You'll need your username and password for each account. To link an account, you'll search for the name of your financial institution in the “Link Your Account” dialog box on Empower (you get to it by clicking the “+” icon near the top left of the Dashboard):

Link Your Account to Personal Capital

Tip: You can search by the name of your financial institution or by its website address (URL). In the unlikely event you have a financial account that can't be linked to Empower, you can enter it manually.

So why bother to connect all of your accounts? As you'll see below, Empower does a lot more than keep an eye on your investments. By connecting all of your financial accounts, you can track your net worth, budget, cash flow, and even your bills. And all of this information is pulled together in a Dashboard.

Settings & Profile

Once you've linked your accounts, it's critical that you complete your Settings and Profile. Both can be found by clicking on your name in the top right corner of the screen.

With Settings, you have control over email subscriptions (you can get daily or weekly updates of all your income, spending and investments), whether to include investment income and dividends in cash flow (I do), and any accounts to exclude from the advice Empower offers (I don't exclude any).

Settings also include important security features. It's here that you can configure multi-factor authentication (highly recommended) and an alert anytime a login is attempted from a foreign country (also highly recommended).

Empower also shows you a list of the devices you've authorized to access your account and when the last sign-on from that device occurred. I'll often delete old devices I no longer use from this list.

The Profile is where you can set information about you and your spouse, your savings, income sources, and investment objectives. These are important settings that Empower uses in its planning tools, such as its free Retirement Planner.

Dashboard

Once you've linked all of your accounts, Empower aggregates it in the Dashboard. The Dashboard gives you a snapshot of your entire financial picture. Here's what the dashboard looks like:

Empower Financial Dashboard
Empower Personal Dashboard

As you can see, it gives you a snapshot of your net worth, your monthly budget, your cash flow, your investments, and even where you are on your retirement and emergency savings goals.

Net Worth

There's nothing more important to your financial freedom than racking your net worth. While I'm a big believer in keeping tabs on it in a spreadsheet (which I've done for years), I also track it in Empower. If you connect all of your financial accounts, it's tracked automatically.

Here's what the Net Worth screen looks like in Empower:

Empower Net Worth Tracker
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Empower Banking

I'm surprised at how much I use the banking features of Empower. The primary features that I rely on are the Cash Flow and Budgeting functions. Specifically, the tool shows me how much investment income we generate each month (interest and dividends). The budget tool shows me how much we spent and on what by category.

Cash Flow

Cash flow shows both your income and expenses at a transaction level. Expenses are automatically categorized. You can easily drill down into income or expenses to look at the details.

You can also select which accounts to include in the report. I use this account selection feature to look at just my business expenses (I've connected by business checking and credit card accounts). I also use it to look at income just from my investment accounts. This allows me to quickly see all dividends and interest earned in my portfolio.

Empower Budgeting

Budgeting

The budgeting feature is not a traditional budgeting app. You can set an overall monthly spending goal, but you can't set goals by category. If that's what you need, I highly recommend YNAB (You Need a Budget).

What Empower does well is give you visibility into how you've spent your money by category. It automatically imports all spending from each linked account and categorizes the spending. You can customize the categories. I've found Empower to do a reasonably good job of getting the categories right, although I do spend about 5 minutes a month correcting some transactions.

Tip: In addition to categories, you can tag transactions, too. I use a limited number of categories, and than tag transactions as needed. For example, we have a home maintenance category. For work on our pool, I tag those transactions as “pool” so I can see how much we spend on the pool without need to create a separate categori.

Bills

The bills feature is another reason to link your credit cards, mortgage, and other loans. Empower keeps track of when bills are due with your linked accounts. This helps you avoid missed or late payments, and it helps with planning throughout the month.

Try Empower for Free

Empower Investing

Here's where Empower really shines. Once you've connected your retirement and non-retirement accounts, it tracks your investments automatically. It updates prices throughout the trading day and keeps tabs on mutual fund expenses. It also shows you your asset allocation and offers a number of tools to help you evaluate your portfolio

Holdings

You get an overview of each of your holdings. The tool shows the following for each investment you own:

  • The name of each investment
  • Its ticker
  • How many shares you own
  • The current price
  • The days change (in both dollars and as a percentage)
  • The total value

It also gives you an overview of your performance. Here's mine in the middle of the 2020 bear market (Yikes!):

Empower Investment Checkup

Allocation

EMpower also shows you your asset allocation. It automatically evaluates your investments and reports on your stock/bond allocation. For each it breaks down asset classes further, showing U.S. and International stocks and bonds, as well as alternatives.

The tool also provides a useful interactive graphic representation of your portfolio allocation. With the click of a mouse, you can explore what investments make up each of these asset classes. One interesting item is cash. The asset allocation tool not only shows you the cash in say money market accounts, but it also sees the cash held by stock mutual funds.

Tracking Bitcoin & Crypto

In big news for those who invest in Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and other cryptocurrencies, Empower can now track these investments. Best of all, investors do not need to grant access to their crypto wallets or turn over passwords.

Instead, investors can add a manual account in Empower. For each token owned, you simply indicate the symbol, exchange, and amount. Empower is now able to track thousands of tokens across hundreds of exchanges.

Empower Planning

So far the dashboard has simply shown you your accounts and investments from various perspectives. It's the planning tools that really take the tool to the next level.

Retirement Planner

Empower's retirement planner is both robust and easy to use. Because you've connected all of your investment accounts, Empower can use this data to determine your retirement readiness. The screenshot below shows you what the calculator looks like once you've linked your accounts.

Empower Retirement Planner

There's a lot going on here, so let's break it down:

  • Profile: In the bottom right of the above screenshot is the “Edit Profile” button. It's here that you can set your marital status, tax filing status, you and your spouse's name and dates of birth, how much you each earn per year, and any children you have.
  • Assumptions: The “Edit Assumptions” button enables you to set an estimate of your effective tax rate, inflation rate, and your life expectancy.
  • Income Events: You can add ongoing or one-time income events. These may include your yearly savings, a planned sale of a business or other asset, pension income you'll receive in retirement, and even an estimate of your social security.
  • Spending Goals: Spending goals can include an estimate of your yearly spending in retirement as well as one-time expenses. For example, you could include the cost of a planned vacation in retirement or the cost of a future wedding for your children.
  • Retirement Score: Your retirement score shows a percentage representing the likelihood that your money will last through retirement. According to Empower, a score of 50% to 80% “suggests you are on track, but it is important to understand and acknowledge that the portfolio does deplete in a meaningful amount of the projected scenarios.” A score above 90% means “there is relatively little to worry about and, most likely, you could afford greater spending now or it will be possible to increase spending over time.”
  • Graph Views: The graph above shows the portfolio based on an analysis of thousands of potential market returns. You can also view your accounts by asset location (i.e., Taxable, Tax Deferred and Tax Free.

The Retirement Planner also enables you to create multiple scenarios and then compare them. For example, one scenario may have you retiring at a traditional age, while another one has you retiring early. In one, you may include an estimate of social security, while in another one you exclude it. You could also change the assumptions on one scenario related to your effective tax rate, future inflation, or your life expectancy.

Once you've created a new scenario, you can then compare them side-by-side.

Savings Planner

The Savings Planner is three tools in one: Retirement Savings, Emergency Fund Savings, and Debt Paydown. Each enables you to set and track goals.

Personal Capital Savings Planner

Retirement Savings Planner

Here you can set an annual retirement savings goal. The planner tracks your actual savings throughout the year, including your contributions to retirement accounts like 401k and IRAs. It will also track any savings you have in taxable accounts.

Keep in mind that this planner and your Retirement Planner are connected. If you change your savings goal in one, it automatically updates the other.

Emergency Fund Savings Planner

For the Emergency Fund, Empower totals the value of all of your linked bank accounts. It then recommends an Emergency Fund of 3 to 6 months worth of expenses based on the budget amount that you set. As with the retirement planner, any changes in your monthly budgeted amount here automatically updates your Budget in the Banking section of Empower.

Debt Paydown Planner

Any debts, including car loans, mortgages and personal loans, will show up in the Debt Paydown planner. Note that credit card debt will also show up in the planner if there have been at least two interest transactions within the last 90 days. In other words, your credit cards will not show up here if you pay them off in full each month, thereby avoiding interest charges.

The planner will show each debt, along with its interest rate (APR), change in balance year to date, and current balance. It also displays a graph of the changing in debt balances in the current year.

Retirement Fee Analyzer

The retirement fee analyzer is, I must confess, my favorite part of Empower. It's easy to dismiss relatively “small” investment fees as unimportant. The problem, of course, is the effect fees have on your wealth over decades of time. A 1% advisor or mutual fund fee may seem small, but over time it can literally cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Empower Investment Fee Analyzer

Empower calculates a weighted average expense ratio for all of your linked accounts. Mine comes in at just 6 basis points–0.06%. That's well below the average, and yet it will still cost me $17,865 over the next seven years according to the Fee Analyzer!

Fees matter–a lot. This tool by itself makes Empower a must.

Try Empower for Free

Investment Fee Checkup

The investment checkup evaluates your asset allocation and compares it to what Empower recommends. Based on your investment profile, Empower recommends an asset allocation. Here's what it recommends for me, given my age, years to retirement, and risk tolerance:

Personal Capital target asset allocation
Recommended Asset Allocation

My actual allocation has about 5% more bonds than what the above graphic shows. What's interesting about this tool is that Empower also shows you the historical performance of its recommended portfolio, future projections, risk & return and a comparison with your actual allocation.

If you want to follow the recommendation, Empower provides a listing of those asset classes that need to increased, decreased and by how much.

Empower FAQs

Is Empower safe?

Yes. Empower encrypts data with AES-256 with multi-layer key management, including rotating user-specific keys and salts. Further, no individual at Empower has access to your credentials.
In addition, you must authenticate each device that accesses your account. You'll receive an automated phone call, email or text message to confirm your identity. You can learn more about Empower's security here.

Is Empower really free?

Yep. Its investment services are not, but its financial tools are completely free.

Will Empower call me?

Yes. They use the financial dashboard as a marketing tool. I've spoken with their advisors in the past, although I've never used the investment services. If you don't want them to call you, just tell them. They honored my request.

Do I have to invest with Empower to use the dashboard?

No.

How much does Empower cost?

The financial dashboard is free. If you do want to use their investment advisory services, the fees start at 0.89% for the first $1 million and go down to 0.49% for amounts over $10 million.

Try Empower for Free

Related: Best Financial Tools & Resources, Best Stock Tracking Apps, Best Quicken Alternatives, Best Mint Alternatives

Filed Under: Tools

Tiller Money Review and User’s Guide (2023)

March 2, 2021 by Rob Berger

Some of the links in this article may be affiliate links, meaning at no cost to you I earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase or open an account. I only recommend products or services that I (1) believe in and (2) would recommend to my mom. Advertisers have had no control, influence, or input on this article, and they never will.

Tiller Money enables you to manage your financial life in spreadsheets that are automatically updated every day. The tools make it easy to create budgets, track net worth, and even manage your Investments. We'll take a deep dive into the tool in this 2022 Tiller Money review and user guide.

Tiller Money Review
Tiller Money Review
In this review
 [hide]
  • How Tiller Money Works
    • Connecting Financial Accounts to Tiller Money
    • Creating Spreadsheets with Tiller's Foundation Template
    • Using Tiller's Tools to Manage your Finances
  • Tiller Google Sheet Add-ons
    • Tiller Money Feeds
    • Tiller Money Labs
  • Budgeting with Tiller Money
  • Is Tiller Safe?
  • How Much Does Tiller Cost?
  • Tiller Rating
  • Tiller Money Video

I met the Tiller Money team several years ago at Fincon, a personal finance bloggers conference. They were kind enough to give me a demo of their software. At the time, I'll be honest, I didn't really understand how Tiller Money worked. I found it confusing at first.

Once I understood the basic concept, however, it became clear just how powerful and easy it is to use. More recently, I've spent a lot of time with the tool and absolutely love it. It's become my primary budgeting tool, which I use in conjunction with Personal Capital to track my investments.

In this review and user's guide, I'll walk through the main features of Tiller Money, how I use the tool, and how it can help you manage your money.

How Tiller Money Works

Many people, myself included, love working with spreadsheets. They are easy to use and give us complete control over our data. When it comes to budgeting and managing money with a spreadsheet, however, there are three key problems:

  1. We have to manually enter our income and expenses;
  2. We have to spend time designing the spreadsheet if we want it to look good; and
  3. We don't have basic tools available with must budgeting apps

Tiller Money solves each of these problems.

Tiller Money enables you to link your financial accounts to a Google or Excel spreadsheet. Once linked, transaction data and balances are automatically downloaded into the spreadsheet. That solves the first problem.

Tiller also provides a robust template that can enable you to track your budget, net worth, investments, and even your business income and expenses. Problem number two solved.

Finally, Tiller gives you a robust and growing set of tools to analyze your finances. We'll look at several in just a minute. Problem number three solved. In fact, Tiller solves these issues so well that it made my list of the best Quicken alternatives.

Connecting Financial Accounts to Tiller Money

The first step to using Tiller Money is to connect your financial accounts. Tiller enables you to connect checking accounts, savings accounts, credit cards, and even investment accounts. Tiller uses bank level security through Yodlee, which nine out of the 15 largest banks in the country also use.

Once logged in to Tiller, you simply click the Add Accounts button.

A pop-up box will prompt you to search for your financial institution. I've yet to encounter a bank account, credit card or investment account that Tiller can't handle. You'll enter your login credentials for your financial institution to connect it. Tiller money will never have access to your login credentials or to any of your financial institutions (more about security below).

Get Tiller 30-Day Free Trial

Creating Spreadsheets with Tiller's Foundation Template

The heart and soul of Tiller is the Tiller Foundation Template. While you can create your own spreadsheet from scratch, I highly recommend you start with the Tiller template. You simply launch the Google Sheet and walk through a number of easy steps to authorize the template in your Google account (see video below for a walk-thru of the process).

Tiller Monthly Budget Dashboard
Tiller Monthly Budget Dashboard

Here's where one thing tripped me up. Having connected my accounts, I launched the Tiller Foundation Template. When I opened it, there were no transactions. What it took me some time to understand is that connecting my accounts to Tiller does not automatically connect them to the spreadsheet. That's actually good news.

It allows me to connect those accounts that I want to in up to five spreadsheets. For example, I connect our personal accounts to our personal budget spreadsheet. I connect my business checking account and credit card to a separate Tiller spreadsheet I use to track my business. And I connect our investment accounts to yet a third Tiller spreadsheet to track our net worth.

Of course, you decided how to set up Tiller. You could track everything in one spreadsheet if that's what you wanted to do. For each of up to five spreadsheets, you can connect any or all of the financial accounts you've connected to Tiller. Once you have the spreadsheet set up and connected the financial accounts, Tiller offers a host of tools and templates to manage virtually every aspect of your financial life. 

Using Tiller's Tools to Manage your Finances

Once you've launched the Tiller Foundation Template and connected your accounts to the spreadsheet, you'll notice a number of tabs in the Google Sheet. These include the Insights tab, which is a financial dashboard that gives you a high level summary of your financial data. There's a Transactions tab that lists all of the transactions from all of the accounts you've connected to the spreadsheet. A Categories tab enables you to define your income and expense categories and set a monthly budget for each expense.

There's a monthly budget tab that summarizes your income and expense data by month. There's also a yearly budget tab, that shows you all of your income and expenses for an entire year.

Tiller Google Sheet Add-ons

There are two really important add-ons to Google Sheets that you'll want to use with Tiller. One is called Tiller Money Feeds, and the other is called Tiller Money Labs.

Tiller Money Feeds

Tiller Money Feeds provides the tools you need to connect your financial accounts to each spreadsheet. We've already covered it above, and it gets added to your spreadsheet as part of the process of using the template.

It includes a feature called AutoCat, which allows you to automatically categorize income and expenses based on the transaction description. More about this feature in a moment.

Tiller Money Labs

The Tiller Money Labs add-on provides additional tools that are incredibly useful. You can add it to Google Sheets by going to the Add-ons menu, select Get Add-ons, and then searching for Tiller Money Labs. This Add-on gives you access to a number of extremely useful tools that are far too numerous to cover in one review. But I'll highlight a few of the more important ones.

Split transactions: As the name suggests, it makes it very easy to split a transaction across multiple categories.

Net worth dashboard:  A template focusing on balances and how they change over time. It includes a net worth chart and trends table for up to 12 months of net worth data. A similar tool, called the Net Worth Snapshot, enables you to compare your net worth over two different years.

Debt planner: A streamlined debt-planning tool to build and manage your debt payoff plan and achieve debt freedom.

Bill payment tracker: The Bill Payment Tracker is designed to keep you informed about your upcoming bill payments.

Tiller also offers a number of dashboards for small businesses. I use a separate Google Sheet to track the income and expenses of my business. While I have a bookkeeper and use QuickBooks, I like Tiller as the better way to actually budget my expenses and to track them, day to day. It's just much easier than QuickBooks.

There are even tools for those pursuing FIRE (financial independence / retire early). Specifically, it offers a Retirement Planner that estimates the total value of your investments into the future. You can experiment with different growth rate scenarios and project outcomes in real time.

Budgeting with Tiller Money

Budgeting is the core Tiller feature. Once you've connected your financial accounts to the spreadsheet, the first thing you should do, in my opinion, is set up your categories in the Tiller Foundation Template. Here's what the categories tab looks like in the template:

Tiller Money Category Sheet
Tiller Categories Sheet

You can and should customize the categories and groups. The groups organize the categories when viewed on a monthly or yearly basis. If you love the 50/30/20 budget, you could use just three groups that map to Needs (50%), Wants (30%) and Freedom (20%–savings, investing and debt paydown). You can also set your budget for the year. Any budget amounts you enter in the Jan 2022 column will automatically populate for the rest of the year.

Once you've created your categories, you can go to the transaction tab and begin giving each income and expense transaction a category. Here it's important to know that Tiller offers what it calls an automatic category tool (AutoCat). What this allows you to do is to automatically set the category of a transaction based on the contents of the transaction description.

For example, you could set all transactions with a description that includes “Starbucks” to a coffee category or perhaps a restaurant category. Once these AutoCat categories are set up, the vast majority of your transactions will be automatically and correctly categorized. It's a very cool feature.

Is Tiller Safe?

One important question is whether Tiller Money is safe. The short answer is yes. Tiller supports two factor authentication. When you connect a financial account with two factor authentication enabled the pop-up box will ask you for the code that either gets texted to you or that is generated from an authentication app if that's what you use. The data is protected with bank grade 256 bit AES encryption.

Furthermore, Tiller connects to your financial institutions using Yodlee. It's an industry standard tool used by nine of the 15 largest U.S. banks. As noted earlier, Tiller does not see or store your login credentials to your financial accounts. In addition, no one at Tiller will see your data unless you specifically choose to share it with a Tiller analyst or support team member. Tiller's access to your accounts is strictly read only, and it has no ability to move any of your money.

How Much Does Tiller Cost?

You can use Tiller for free for 30 days without any obligation. If you like it and want to continue using it, it's $79 a year.

Tiller Rating

Tiller Money Rating

Rob Berger

Features
Ease of Use
Budgeting
Cost
Community

Summary

Tiller Money is one of the best budgeting tools available today. It gives you the power, flexibility and simplicity of a spreadsheet, with the tools and templates that compete with the best budgeting apps available today.

4.6

Tiller Money Video

Tiller Money–Budgeting Spreadsheet

Filed Under: Tools

Morningstar User’s Guide

May 10, 2020 by Rob Berger

Some of the links in this article may be affiliate links, meaning at no cost to you I earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase or open an account. I only recommend products or services that I (1) believe in and (2) would recommend to my mom. Advertisers have had no control, influence, or input on this article, and they never will.

Welcome to the Morningstar User's Guide. We're going to cover everything you need to know about using and getting the most advantage out of Morningstar. In this first article and video, we'll cover an overview of Morningstar. We will also look at some resources you'll need as we work through this guide.

It's my hope that this will help you become a better, more confident investor.

Table Of Contents
  1. Morningstar User's Guide Video
  2. Morningstar Overview
  3. Issues with Morningstar's New Website
  4. This Morningstar User's Guide
    • Part 1: The Data
    • Part 2: Using The Data
    • Part 3: Portfolio Manager
    • Part 4: Morningstar Tools
  5. Morningstar Resources You Need Handy for this User's Guide
    • Membership
    • Snapshot and Glossary
    • Morningstar Search Tool

Morningstar User's Guide Video

Morningstar Overview

Morningstar was founded in 1984. Before the internet as we know it, by Joe Mansueto. The story is that he started it in his apartment in Chicago with about $80,000. I don't know if that's true, but regardless, he started Morningstar in 1984. Today, it's a publicly traded company trading under the ticker MORN. It went public in 2005.

Last year, Morningstar generated about $1.2 billion in revenue. By my calculations, individual investors who pay for the premium version of Morningstar accounted for only about $22 million. Most of the revenue comes from tools designed for professional money managers and investment advisors. Some of these tools can cost tens of thousands of dollars a year.

The good news is that Morningstar made a lot of its data available for free to individual investors. And its premium version, which offers additional tools, is only $199. So that's the good news.

Issues with Morningstar's New Website

Now, there is some bad news. Last year Morningstar made some substantial changes to its website. They launched the new website in July 2019. The look of the new site is an improvement, sort of.

Here's what the old site looked like:

Morningstar old website

And here's the current website design:

Morningstar new website

The problem is that the functionality took a big hit for several reasons.

First of all, they took away a lot of the tools and data that were available in the old version of the site. For example, the removed the after-tax returns of mutual funds, which I thought was a very helpful data point. There are ways to get at that information, and we will cover that when we get to it in the series. That's the good news, we can still get back to this old version, for now.

Second, they haven't bothered to update the user guide. The Premium User Guide for paid members still reflects the old website design and functionality. I reached out to Morningstar support, thinking I just couldn't find the new guide. Nope. They haven't updated it. I guess that makes this User's Guide all the more important!

Finally, many of the tools that still exist are really hard to find. In the old version they had a menu item called “Tools.” Seems simple enough. That page now no longer exists. So there's no one page to go to to see all of the tools Morningstar offers investors.

This Morningstar User's Guide

This guide will be divided into four parts.

Part 1: The Data

The first part is going to be simply understanding the data. It'll be creating a number of videos that walk through all of the data about mutual funds, ETFs an stocks that Morningstar offers.

Part 2: Using The Data

Now that we have all this data from Part 1, how do we actually use it to make important investment decisions? That's what we will cover in Part 2. First, we'll figure out of all of the data you get from Morningstar, what pieces of it are really important. And then once we know that, we'll cover how to use the data.

How do we use it to pick a mutual fund in our 401k? How do we compare two mutual funds? So we'll be looking at that in part two.

Part 3: Portfolio Manager

In Part 3, we're going to be looking at the portfolio manager in Morningstar.
We will walk through the Portfolio Manager, showing you how to set up your own portfolio, how to add new holdings, and then the different ways you can use the tool to evaluate your investments.

Part 4: Morningstar Tools

In Part 4 we will look at Morningstar Tools. These include fund and stock screeners, calculators, and the X-Ray tool.

Morningstar Resources You Need Handy for this User's Guide

To finish out this brief overview, I want to talk about some things that that you want to keep in mind that are important as we move through the series.

Membership

The first is the Morningstar membership options. For individual investors like you and me, there's are two options. At a minimum, you'll want the Morningstar basic membership. It's free, and you will need it to create and monitor your portfolio. If you want the premium version, it costs $199 per year.

Here's what the two options cover:

Morningstar Membership Options
Try Morningstar for Free

While I'm a Premium member, it's not necessary for most people.

Snapshot and Glossary

Two more things briefly, that I think you should focus on, or at least have handy. The first is Morningstar Snapshot definitions.This gives you the definitions of key terms and concepts that we will encounter throughout this series.

For example, Morningstar categorizes mutual funds as a stock, bond or balanced fund. One might think that a bond mutual fund invests in bonds. Well, it does, but Morningstar categorizes a fund as a bond fund if at least 80% of its assets are on bonds. As a result, a “bond” mutual fund could also have a not insignificant amount invested in equities.

As another example, consider Morningstar's definition of an international stock fund. According to Snapshot, it's a stock fund that has invested 40% or more of its equity holdings in foreign stocks. So don't assume you know Morningstar's definition of these terms.

A similar tool is the Morningstar Glossary. It offers a wider range of investing terms.

Morningstar Search Tool

The last thing I want to show you in this overview is the search box on Morningstar. This really is the door through which you'll find a lot of the things that you need on Morningstar. For example, you can you the search box in several ways to find key information on Morningstar:

  • Ticker: Search an investment by its ticker symbol
  • Name: Search a mutual fund or stock by name
  • Screener: Search the term “Screener” to find Morningstar's stock and fund screeners
  • Tool: Search the term “Tool” to find Morningstar's calculators and other investment tools

Filed Under: Investing, Tools

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