Empower (previously known as Personal Capital) has been a leading money management tool for the last few years. Empower Personal Finance Review: Pros And Cons They offer great spending and investment tracking, all for free. They also recently launched an online savings account with a compelling yield. Empower Personal Finance Review: Pros And Cons
My personal love affair with mint is now over. It’s still a great free money management tool, but I’ve always had a negative view about how Mint handled investments, and now they’re shutting down anyway. It just didn’t do enough for my investments to really help me in my personal finances. And since investing is such a big part of my finances, I always relied on Quicken instead. Empower Personal Finance Review: Pros And Cons
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But in my continued quest to move my finances to the cloud and looking for Quicken alternatives, I’ve found a free tool that really nails everything Mint does, PLUS investments. It’s called Empower.
See why we like this tool in our Empower review. Plus, learn about their upsells and their new compelling cash account as well. And see how they compare to the other top money and financial tracker apps out there. Empower Personal Finance Review: Pros And Cons
What is ’empower’?
Empower is both a budgeting app and financial tracking tool, as well as an investment manager. They are most well known for their financial dashboard – where you can track your spending, budget, monitor your investment portfolio, and more. The best part is that this tool is currently free.
They are also a professional investment manager, where you can meet with a financial planner and allow them to manage your portfolio for a fee. They effectively use their free dashboard as a lead generator for their investment management services.
Empower (which was previously known as Personal Capital) was founded in 2010 and was acquired by Empower Retirement in July 2020. Empower Personal Finance Review: Pros And Cons
- The Value of Your Portfolio
- The Performance of Your Portfolio (as a whole and of each individual investment)
- An Overview of Your Holdings
- An Analysis of Your Allocation
- Good Transaction Management
What always frustrated me about Mint (and sometimes Quicken) was the transaction management. So far, I’ve found Empower to be excellent at correctly managing all imported transactions from my brokerages. For one asset, they didn’t get the symbol (due to the fact it is in a transfer company, not a broking), but I was manually able to input the symbol. Empower Personal Finance Review: Pros And Cons
How Does Empower Compare For Budgeting And Net Worth Tracking?
Empower offers both their free dashboard and net worth tracking, as well as investing advice. We’ll cover the investing advice below, but since most people simply use their free dashboard, we thought we’d compare just the dashboard first. Empower Personal Finance Review: Pros And Cons
Empower’s dashboard is a great option for those looking to track both spending and investing. Mint was a close runner-up until it shut down, as was Quicken (however, Quicken is a paid product). Another runner-up is Monarch, which has been developing a lot of great tools to compete – but it’s also paid. YNAB is another very popular option, but it’s different in its approach. See our full YNAB vs. Empower comparison here.
If you’re looking at simply net worth tracking, Kubera is a solid option.
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The trouble with “free” is that these companies cannot sustain all the costs of running this type of software with connections to the various platforms. It costs roughly $0.005 per month, per account, for every connection. Considering someone like myself has upwards of 20 connections (banks and brokerages), that’s $0.10 per month. Doesn’t sound like much, but it can add up really fast! Empower Personal Finance Review: Pros And Cons
Hence, Empower is one of the last of the free tools – because you are actually the product. They’re going to try to sell you on investment management (see below).
If you’re simply looking to compare their free dashboard, here are some of the options. See the full list of mint alternatives here.
Investing Advice
To me, it is always important to know how a company offering a free service makes money. And Empower makes money by promoting their financial advisers to help you with your portfolio. Their goal is to eventually get you as an asset management client – and once you cross $100,000 in assets, you can expect their advisors to begin calling you and encouraging you to meet with them to review your portfolio. Empower Personal Finance Review: Pros And Cons
If you decide to work with them, they do charge (quite a bit) to manage your portfolio. While their fees are all inclusive, you can expect to start paying 0.89% AUM (assets-under-management) if you have less than $1,000,000 invested with them.
They actually call you different levels based on how much you have invested:
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- $100,000 to $200,000: Investment Services Client
- $200,000 to $999,999: Wealth Management Client
- Over $1,000,000: Private Client
As you have more funds invested, your AUM goes down. Once you hit “Private Client” status, you’ll start saving a little in AUM fees. However, it is tiered:
How Does Empower Wealth Management Work? Compare?
Honestly, Empower’s Wealth Management services are more expensive than other companies. While they have a great free dashboard, their investment services are more expensive than other companies’. They’re not a robo-advisor, but they’re also more expensive than other firms who do direct human-assisted investing. Empower Personal Finance Review: Pros And Cons
Empower Cash
Empower recently announced Empower Cash. This is a cash management account, and it acts like a high-yield savings account.
The Empower Cash account yields 3.00 APY, which is a very compelling offer. The account is also FDIC insured, and since it’s a cash management account, there are no transaction limits on deposits or withdrawals.