Been striving to overhaul your financial management tools to come up with the perfect mix of solutions for visualizing and managing your personal wealth?
We wish you luck.
Building a wealth tech stack full of the right variety of financial management software can really make a difference in how your wealth grows.
However, there are a lot of different platforms out there to help you — or try to help you — achieve that.
How’s a person supposed to choose?
To separate the empty promises from the platforms that will actually make a difference, keep reading for our recommendations across categories.
What’s a Wealth Tech Stack?
Let’s start with the origin of the phrase.
In the tech world, there’s something called a “tech stack.”
A tech stack is a collection of elements — applications, software platforms, databases, programming languages, frameworks, servers, operating systems, etc. — that all work together to make a certain digital tool or process work.
Most of the digital applications, platforms, and other tools that you use were created from a totally unique “stack” of technological elements that came together to make it tick.
You can apply this same thinking to the idea of a “wealth tech stack.”
Your wealth tech stack is a customized combination of different types of digital financial management tools — a net worth tracker, asset management software, a budgeting platform, etc.
Just like any business’ tech stack, a wealth tech stack should be made up of a flexible and separate but integrated selection of tools that work together to help you manage and grow your personal wealth.
What’s the Point of a Wealth Tech Stack?
As we’ve alluded to several times, a wealth tech stack is all about creating the ability to easily and sustainably manage and grow your personal wealth.
But how does it do that?
There are several capabilities inherent to the wealth tech stack that help money grow.
Portfolio Visibility for Improved Diversification
A good portfolio diversification strategy encourages investors to add a variety of uncorrelated assets to their investment portfolio.
Why’s that matter? Diversification means that even if one asset class (say stocks) tanks, an uncorrelated asset class (say gold) ensures your portfolio keeps generating returns. It’s a key strategy for riding out times of market volatility — which seem to be happening more and more often recently!
Diversifying effectively requires an acute understanding of what’s already in your portfolio, so you can make sure you’re wisely investing in assets that’ll balance things out.
What can provide this level of understanding? An element of your wealth tech stack that prioritizes portfolio visibility.
Calculate and Keep an Eye on Net Worth Change
Net worth subtracts your liabilities from your assets to give you a number that sums up the value of everything you own.
This makes it an easy-to-find and easy-to-track metric for monitoring your overall wealth health.
Similar to the problem of effective diversification, it also takes a lot of visibility into your holdings to be able to calculate and monitor net worth movement.
In addition to a tool that enables portfolio visibility, your wealth tech stack should also contain a platform that makes calculating and tracking net worth approachable.
Make the Most Informed Wealth Plans
Planning and paving the way for big financial goals requires lots of different types of financial tools.
Some of these tools will provide wealth performance history so your predictions are right on the money, some will help you invest wisely to grow your resources, some will help you budget better so as to save those resources, and so on.
If you have goals for your personal wealth, you’ll want to sit down and identify the best tools for your wealth tech stack to help you meet each.
7 Best Wealth Management Tools for Your Wealth Stack
As noted, your wealth tech stack should be a flexible thing, ready to pivot as your goals are checked off or change throughout your life.
However, the tools listed here will make up a powerful base for anyone who wants to hit the ground running and do their deeper personalizations later.
Top Portfolio Management Tool: Kubera
Portfolio management software is a pivotal piece of wealth tech for getting a comprehensive view of all your assets, how they’re performing, and ideally even how they’re impacting your net worth.
Kubera is personal balance sheet software that helps you visualize and manage your entire portfolio.
From precious metals to baseball cards, Bitcoins, homes, stocks, family heirlooms, and pretty much anything else — if you can own it, Kubera can track it.
Curious? See just some of the thousands of financial institutions with which Kubera integrates right here.
All the modern, diversified investor has to do is sign up — our pricing is simple and affordable! — and set up to start self-managing their portfolio in just hours, not days.
It’s not only about visualization with Kubera, it’s also about understanding performance.
That’s where the IRR for investments calculator comes in.
Using information like cash flow, purchase price, value, and holding time; Kubera will automatically generate the IRR (that’s internal rate of return) for pretty much any of your assets.
It even does all of this in your preferred currency — and with a comparison to popular benchmarks.
This information is what makes Kubera the best instrument for deciding whether an investment’s profitability aligns with your goals and expectations, and what investment to make next in light of that insight.
And finally for that last element in the trifecta of perfect portfolio management features: net worth integration.
Kubera’s Recap screen aggregates all your data so you can see how assets are impacting net worth and how it’s changing — daily all the way up to year-over-year.
Innovative Borrowing, Spending, & Investment Management: M1 Finance
We see why M1 calls itself “The Finance Super App.”
This unique platform can be used to invest in stocks and crypto, set up an IRA retirement fund, borrow against your investments, and do your digital banking through their checking and credit card capabilities.
With a focus on automation and integration across all their features, it’s clear M1 aims to be the most creative all-in-one wealth growth tool on the market.
We find it to be an innovative approach to giving people a single, powerful platform from which to act on their own financial goals and strategies. Feeling very keyed in on where you want to take your wealth and excited about using modern tech and smart automation to help you do it? Then try M1 in your wealth stack.
Best in Budgeting: PocketGuard
PocketGuard stays true to its name with web and mobile apps that aim to keep you safe against overspending.
PocketGuard is unique among budgeting apps in that you can link it to a lot of different resources: bank accounts, investment accounts, credit cards, and even loans. This level of integration means PocketGuard understands your account balances as well as how they impact your net worth over time.
Use PocketGuard to earmark money for bills, necessities, and even goals, then view how much you have left over to spend after all of those are taken care of. Customizable reports help you see where your money has gone, and an automatic saving feature will put money toward the goals you’ve set.
PocketGuard’s combo of budgeting and money management features will help it pull its weight alongside the other robust tools in your wealth tech stack.
Prime Tax Filing Management Software: TaxSlayer
Love it or hate it, taxes are a huge element of your financial life. We hope we can make them a little more tolerable with our recommendation for tax filing software that slays the exorbitant fees you’re used to.
With most tax filing software, and financial software in general, the different pricing tiers will host different feature sets. So the more you pay, the more features you get access to.
Not with TaxSlayer.
With TaxSlayer, all payment tiers get the same forms and features. All that changes is the level of support. If you feel very confident filing your taxes, you’ll pay less. However, if you desire more support for a finicky situation, all you have to do is upgrade your payment plan to get one-on-one help from a pro.
We appreciate financial software that changes the game in a way that’s actually in the consumer’s best interest. That’s why, if you don’t already have a regular professional helping you with your taxes, we recommend adding TaxSlayer to the roster.
The Smartest Automated Robo-Advisor: Merrill Guided Investing
From Merrill (fka Merrill Lynch) comes Merrill Guided Investing, an automated investment platform built on over a century of wealth management.
Merrill Guided Investing allows users to set their own investment goals — or work with an investment advisor to set them — then automatically invests based on those goals. With either option, your portfolio is revisited and rebalanced once in a while by human financial professionals.
For investors who are comfortable with automated investing, the $1,000 minimum investment and .45% fee from Merrill Guided Investing makes for an attractive rate.
Robust Net Worth Tracker: Personal Capital
Connect your financial accounts, credit cards, and loans to Personal Capital to take advantage of their free financial management dashboard.
This dashboard comes equipped with a net worth tracker that keeps you in the loop on how your net worth changes over time as you invest and save more, pay off debt, make purchases, and so on.
This real-time net worth tracker can be a helpful add-on if you aren't already using a tool that includes net worth info. It is worth noting that most of Personal Capital’s free tools are part of their marketing funnel, so using them means you will likely be contacted by their sales team attempting to sell you on their paid financial services.
Most Helpful Retirement Planner Platform: NewRetirement
We like NewRetirement’s mission to help people see the whole picture when it comes to preparing for retirement.
Along with how you’re investing and how much you’re saving, NewRetirement’s platform encourages users to account for changes in taxes and income, future real estate holdings, debt that needs to be paid off, their budget in retirement, medical costs, and of course life goals.
While the software is self-guided, NewRetirement understands that not every user may be tech-savvy. So, classes, coaching, and even financial planning services are all available.
If you feel at all shaky about your retirement plan, NewRetirement is something to check out to optimize your wealth tech stack.
5 Steps for Choosing your Best Financial Management Platforms
When it comes time to choose the building blocks of your wealth tech stack, we have a quick process for making sure you select the best tools every time:
Step 1: Choose Your Goals
You can’t very well select the best wealth tech stack tools if you don't actually know what you want them to do. So, before you go shopping, understand what you want your wealth stack to do so that you know which types of tools to put in it.
Step 2: Get Familiar With Key Features
OK, now how can your tools of choice meet your financial goals? Through the right features. So it’s time to learn what features are key to each type of wealth management tool you want. Look around at lots of different tools in the same category to identify the top features.
Step 3: Align Goals and Features
Your personal finance goals + the features that deliver on those goals = the best wealth management tech for your stack. Time to find alignment between goals and features and make your top selections for your wealth stack.
Step 4: Check Out Reviews
The final step in narrowing down your solutions is going through independent reviews on each to see which fits your needs best when it comes to things they don’t talk about on their websites, like ease of use, hidden costs, bugs, support timelines, etc.
Step 5: Make Your Selections and Start Using Your Stack
Sounds like you’ve found your winners! Now, nail down all your final purchases and put a workflow into place for using your new wealth tech stack.
Start Building Your Wealth Tech Stack with Kubera
Every stack has to start somewhere.
Why not start yours on a solid foundation — with one of the only tools built by modern, diversified investors for modern, diversified investors?
Kubera’s unique functionality starts DIY investors on the right foot when it comes to taking charge of their wealth.
Yet, at the same time, it’s still delightful to use even if you do have a trusted financial advisor or wealth manager by your side. They can sign up for Kubera’s white-label solution, which will help them provide an even better experience for their clientele (that’s you!).
But if you're ready to build your wealth tech stack on your own, simply sign up and start understanding, managing, and growing your wealth right now.
