J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors Review 2024

Our Take

J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors is a service that provides clients with a team of financial advisors to manage their investments. It combines an investment platform that manages and gives feedback on your investments with advice from licensed fiduciary financial advisors who play an active role in planning and running your portfolio.

J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors charges reasonable fees, especially when compared to hiring your own investment advisor. While an account minimum of at least $25,000 is required to use this service, this is low compared to other top financial planning services. If you’re considering this wealth management platform with the support of fiduciary advisors committed to your account, our J.P. Morgan Personal Advisor review shows how it stacks up.

Pros & Cons

Account Overview

Account Setup

To start with J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors, you must schedule a phone or video meeting with one of its advisors. You can call J.P. Morgan at 833-930-4515 from Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. ET. Alternatively, you can fill out a form with your contact information. An advisor will reach out to schedule the initial meeting.

During this meeting, the advisor will ask questions about your goals and priorities. The advisor will use this information to create your financial plan and investment portfolios. The advisor will also complete your application to launch an account. J.P. Morgan’s website says this process could take two or three meetings.

If you are happy with the recommended financial plan and investments, you then fund the account. You must have at least $25,000 to use J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors. You can transfer over cash, existing investments, or a retirement plan.

There is no way to test the J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors platform without speaking to an advisor first. You must go through the formal enrollment process to gain access. This is one of the main drawbacks for the J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors.

Goal Planning

During your initial meeting, the J.P. Morgan human advisor will discuss your investment goals, big and small. Some possibilities include saving for retirement, putting money aside for a major purchase, or getting ready to launch a business. The advisor will then use this information to create investment portfolios that meet your goals. If your goals change, you can meet with an advisor again to make the necessary adjustments to your strategy. The advisor will update your investments as necessary.

As a J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors client, you also gain access to retirement plan tools and support from the advisors, including:

• Retirement Analysis: The advisors look at your current savings, expected retirement budget, and other income to determine whether you’re on track.
• Financial Plan Recommendations: The advisors give ideas for how you can save more. They also consider other investments outside the platform, like whether you should buy an annuity.
• Social Security Analysis: The advisors help you determine the best age and strategies for starting Social Security based on your income, age, and marital status.
• Tax Planning: The advisors recommend how to manage withdrawals from your different retirement accounts to minimize taxes.

J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors scores well for goal-planning because you can design a customized financial plan with a human advisor. You aren’t limited to preset selections from a software platform.

Account Services

After you launch your J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors account, you gain access to its cash management and investment account services. Both use a combination of automated planning and input and support from your human financial advisor.

Cash Management

J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors includes automatic sweeps for your uninvested cash. The platform transfers your uninvested cash into a daily money market fund to earn interest. The fund earns 0.01%.

You set up the cash sweep with your financial advisor and decide whether to have it check your account daily, weekly, or monthly. You must have at least $2,500 in uninvested cash to be eligible for the automatic sweep into the money market fund.

J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors customers who wish to sign up for a checking or savings account can do so seprately. For J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors clients with existing checking and savings account, you can transfer money between your investment account and these bank accounts. The checking account offers free withdrawals from any ATM in the world and lets you get support from all Chase branches and concierge services. 

Portfolio Construction

During your introductory meeting with J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors, the human advisor will ask about your goals, risk tolerance, time horizon, and current savings. The advisor will use this information to build a portfolio of investment funds that best meets your goals. The advisor will also set a target asset allocation.

J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors builds your portfolio using exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and mutual funds from J.P. Morgan and other major brokers like Fidelity, PIMCO, Schwab, and Vanguard. At the conservative end, the portfolios use passive strategies to track market indexes, and on the more aggressive end are active strategies trying to outperform the market. Advisors can use funds for specific strategies, such as:

• Target date: You pick a year when you want to access the funds and the advisor creates an asset allocation that makes sense for this deadline. As time passes and the target date draws closer, the advisor will review your risk tolerance and time horizon to determine if adopting a more conservative allocation makes sense.
• Age-based: As part of the regular review process a customer has with an advisor, the client and advisor can decide to make portfolio allocations changes as the client ages.
• Income: This strategy focuses on generating income and capital preservation rather than portfolio growth.
• Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria: You can request J.P. Morgan funds focused on ESG goals. Some options include the ESG Leaders Fund, which invests in companies scoring high in ESG, or the low-carbon fund, which focuses on companies with a low carbon footprint.

J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors limits your portfolios to investment funds. You cannot add individual stocks or bonds to your portfolio.

Portfolio Customization

J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors portfolios are customizable through a financial advisor. These licensed professionals will build an investment portfolio to meet your goals, risk tolerance, and priorities. The advisor can choose between 21 investment models to guide your portfolio.

A J.P. Morgan advisor can also tailor your portfolio to any timeline or preference thanks to its access to a wide range of investment funds. J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors has much more flexibility to meet unique needs than a fully automated robo-advisor, as it empowers its human advisors to guide customization.

The main drawback to this system is that you must also request portfolio investments and changes through your human advisor. You cannot log into the platform and change funds or asset allocation. This can be frustrating if you’re a DIY investor hoping to fine-tune the investments on your own.

Portfolio Management

After you and your advisor design a portfolio, it will then be under the care of a team of fiduciary advisors. The platform will give you daily reports on your investment performance and progress towards your goals. The platform shows how your portfolio is performing versus its benchmark and other portfolios with similar risk and return characteristics. The platform also shows your asset allocation, risk tolerance, and investment goals to give you an idea of how the investments are working to achieve these goals.

If your portfolio drifts away from the target allocation by more than 5%, it  will be rebalanced automatically. Your advisor will also check on your portfolio at least quarterly but could adjust more frequently if needed to keep you on track.

J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors does not offer automated tax-loss harvesting. However, you can request this feature so that your portfolio is reviewed for opportunities to sell investments for a tax deduction and then replace them with something similar. You can also sync external investment accounts to the platform. The platform will consider these portfolios for setting your target allocation. Your human advisor could also give tax-loss harvesting recommendations for your external investments.

If you’d like to change your portfolio, you can schedule a meeting with your advisor to discuss your new goals and priorities. The advisor would then update your portfolio. Your advisor also monitors your portfolio and makes changes as needed for your goals. 

User Experience

Desktop

The J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors desktop experience is clean and straightforward. You can see your portfolio allocation and some basic information about your strategy, like your investment objective and time horizon. You also receive some retirement and goal-planning tools that prove to be helpful for more independent investors.

Mobile

J.P. Morgan also offers a mobile app that you can use to track your accounts, set goals, and schedule meetings with a financial advisor. The app has a nice, clean, user-friendly design. Keeping it simple seems to be doing the trick, though, as J.P. Morgan Wealth Management has won customer satisfaction awards for its desktop platform and mobile app.

Customer Service

When you join as a client with J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors, you are matched up with a team of financial advisors. Members of this advisor team will be your contacts for questions and account support. It’s important to note that you may speak with a different advisor regarding your account, but they will be associated with the team that is assigned to your account. You can also send your team secure messages through the online portal and mobile app. In addition, you can schedule meetings by phone or video.

You can also call the J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors phone support line. It’s available Monday to Friday from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. ET.

Security

J.P. Morgan invests in considerable security measures to protect its users, including:

• Website encryption
• Two-factor authentication for logging in
• Network firewalls
• Secured data centers
• Alerts for account access

In addition, J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors provides SIPC insurance for your investment account. It offers up to the standard limit of $500,000 for your investments, covering up to $250,000 in uninvested cash. If you have a Chase bank account, you also receive FDIC insurance on your deposits.

Education

The platform's landing page provides an FAQ of common questions about how to use J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors, along with videos and screenshots showing the platform. You can also access the vast educational library of resources from J.P. Morgan Wealth Management. These include educational articles, videos, and market news commentary.

If you’re new to investing, J.P. Morgan provides a guide for getting started, walking you through the steps in the process. J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors has a decent range of educational materials to go along with the support from its financial advisors.

Commissions and Fees

J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors charges an asset under management (AUM) fee to handle your portfolio. The J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors’ cost ranges from 0.40% to 0.60% per year, depending on the size of your portfolio. Accounts under $250,0000 are at the 0.60% fee and this doesn’t drop to 0.40% until your assets under management pass $1 million. J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors currently waives the fee for the first six months so that you can try the system for free.

You also need to pay the expenses for the funds in your portfolio. The cost depends on which funds you use. It ranges from 0.03% to 0.25% per year, with an average cost of 0.08%. The human advisors in this program are fiduciaries. They do not earn commissions for selling funds and must put your interests ahead of their own when designing the portfolio.

Final Verdict

If you want a human financial advisor but are worried about the cost, J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors could be an excellent compromise. Users can meet with a human advisor as often as you need, and a financial professional actively designs and updates your investment portfolio and financial plan. Once your portfolio is ready, the J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors platform does a solid job managing it with automated rebalancing and daily performance updates.

However, all the hands-on support from J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors can be a turnoff if you like investing on your own. You must meet with a J.P. Morgan human advisor to launch and change your portfolio. You can’t even test the platform without scheduling an onboarding call first. This is in contrast with traditional robo-advisor platforms that offer more tools and better user experiences meant to eliminate the need for human hand-holding. However, J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors isn’t trying to compete with those offerings. Instead, J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors is one of the best deals for live support from a financial advisor combined with ongoing automated portfolio management.

What Is J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors?

J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors is an investment platform with access to human financial advisors included in the management fee. The human advisors design your financial plan and investment portfolio based on your goals, timeline, and risk tolerance. The automated feature then manages the investments and rebalances the funds as needed to fit your goals. The platform also shows your progress and investment performance. From there, you can schedule meetings with your human advisor to ask questions and update your portfolio on the platform.

How Much Does J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors Charge?

J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors charges between 0.40% and 0.60% of your assets under management annually. It’s 0.60% for portfolios below $250,000, 0.50% for portfolios between $250,000 to $1 million, and 0.40% for portfolios over $1 million. J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors does not charge commissions for selling investments. However, you do need to cover the expenses for the investments in your portfolio, the same as if you had bought them for your own brokerage account.

What Is the Difference between J.P. Morgan Private Client Advisor and Personal Advisor?

J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors is a remote program where you work with an advisor through phone, email, and video calls. In contrast, J.P. Morgan Private Client Advisors pairs you with an in-person, local financial advisor. In exchange, J.P. Morgan Private Client Advisors costs much more. Its fee goes up to 1.45% per year versus the 0.60% maximum in J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors.

What Are the Disadvantages of J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors?

J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors has a relatively high minimum investment of $25,000. As such, it’s not an ideal option for brand-new investors with low capital. Also, J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors requires you to work with an advisor to update and change your portfolio. You can’t customize or change your investments through the platform, which can be frustrating for some investors.

How We Rate Companies

For the Investopedia 2023 Best Robo-Advisors reviews, we revamped our comprehensive rating methodology to reflect the ever-changing landscape of digital wealth management companies and their increasingly competitive product offerings. As part of our commitment to score each platform on an apples-to-apples basis, we excluded Vanguard Personal Advisor, Empower, and J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors from our quantitative ranking model because their emphasis on human advisory services prevents them from being pure digital robo-advisor platforms.

Offering a powerful mix of digital and human advisory services, Vanguard Personal Advisor, Empower, and J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors are three of the top hybrid wealth management companies in the industry. In order to rate these platforms, we used our subject matter expertise to develop a separate discretionary star rating system based on the following categories: account services, account setup, customer service, fees, goal planning, portfolio contents, portfolio management, security, education, and user experience.