Personal Capital promotes their financial advising services using this claim (among others):
Tax Management: We manage to each client’s individual tax return, including asset location across different tax status accounts. We do tax loss harvesting, as do some robo-advisors. Tax loss harvesting can be valuable, but it can quickly become counterproductive if it is on autopilot. The use of individual stocks for the US equity portion of portfolios allows for improved tax reduction.
Since I am not planning on using Personal Capital, but rather putting retirement funds in a Vanguard fixed date fund, what should I be concerned about regarding tax management? Any tips?
Not sure if this helps, but focus first on saving and putting money in (including developing an asset allocation target). If you save and invest well, "tax harvesting" and other similar items will only be useful in limited situations.
Tax loss harvesting only applies to a taxable brokerage/investment account anyway. So, if most of your money is in 401k/Roth/other IRAs, it's basically useless.
It's a good strategy, but again I would worry more about 1) saving, and 2) investing, than I would about minimizing taxes through tax loss harvesting.
You can also just be tax efficient from the beginning by buying dividend stocks inside a Roth/IRA account, and investing in market tracking ETFs in a taxable account since they have limited dividends anyway.
Then, if a big correction or recession comes along, switch your S&P fund for a Dow fund.
Personally, I like the Personal Capital software which I use extensively for my own use, but I don't know that I would ever pay them. If I need an advisor, I would just pay a real person a few hundred dollars once a year to review my portfolio and give me suggestions to make sure I'm not missing anything, rather than pay someone $1,000+ per year on an ongoing basis.