Aggregation services / Vanguard & Yodlee

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sjahoo
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Joined: Wed Jun 16, 2021 8:27 pm

Aggregation services / Vanguard & Yodlee

Post by sjahoo »

Newbie here on Bogleheads . . . thanks in advance.

I've been using Vanguard's aggregation service for years to create a combined view of all my accounts to look at my allocations overall. Why do I have so many accounts and why do I need aggregation? Well . . . . life gets complex. Personal taxable accounts. IRAs from 401ks from former jobs. Current job retirement plans. HSAs. 529s. Inherited IRAs & some other inherited accounts kept separate for legal reasons.

I like to have a single view as it makes plugging numbers by fund into Excel for further analysis by "bucket" for differing asset allocations by timeframe & objective. Maybe I'm odd, but I haven't found a service that will let me group and analyze different groups of accounts easily. For example, I need an specific annual total of different taxable accounts to fill out the FAFSA (my kids are in college). I get that from formulas in my spreadsheet.

I also sometimes use the Vanguard to Financial Engines export to look at potential rebalancing to reach my retirement goals. It seems to work - not perfectly, and not all the time (especially with 2FA accounts), but most of the time it works. It's interesting to see the rebalancing they suggest.

Here's the question. I want to set up the same type of account aggregation & (Excel) portfolio management for my brother. He has funds at Vanguard (and other places), but no option to add the outside account aggregation, and no option to export to Financial Engines for analysis & recommendations as an option on his Vanguard account services page.

Are these services unavailable if you didn't sign up for them years ago? Does anyone here know? Are they being removed by Vanguard (or only offered to "legacy" customers)?

I didn't find much with a cursory search on Google (other than links directing me here).

I've used Mint in the past, but frankly it sucks (bad synchronization, poor categorization of investment transactions, duplicate copies of accounts, no support, geared at income/expenses). Morningstar has portfolio analysis tools, but automating the updates and slicing / dicing the numbers seems cumbersome. I haven't tried Personal Capital, so I'd appreciate aggregation tool recommendations. Schwab and Ameriprise both also seem to offer aggregation services, but I'm not sure they include recommendations (for free).

Oh yeah, and I'm at Vanguard because I hate expenses and fees with a passion. So any fee-based services are not going to be attractive. I partly started using aggregation at Vanguard because it was included, and Mint sucked. At the time, none of the other firms like Fidelity or Schwab were offering aggregation and analysis included with your accounts, so I moved an IRA from Fidelity over to Vanguard in part to be able to get the holistic view.

Or maybe I should just go back to subscribing to Quicken . . .

Thanks in advance.
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