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Empower (formerly Personal Capital): Review

Empower, formerly Personal Capital, was founded in 2009. It offers useful free tools to help users manage their finances with a lot of built-in capabilities and a comprehensive dashboard! 

In 2020, Empower Retirement acquired Personal Capital, which was rebranded as Empower. This combined the functionality and offering of the app with a personalized investment management and retirement planning solution.

What Features Empower Offers

Empower offers a very insightful analytics dashboard. The app is very user-friendly and offers a high-level view of your finances to see where your money is and going!

Portfolio Analysis

Empower offers a powerful tool to review your portfolio’s performance, allocations, and balances. 

With its data aggregation function, Empower can analyze the different holdings you have across multiple brokerages like Vanguard, TDAmeritrade, Fidelity, etc. and offer you a combined view of your entire portfolio. 

Net Worth Calculator

One of the best features of Empower is their net worth tracker. Once you link your accounts through Empower’s secure connections, the dashboard will update to calculate your net worth. You no longer have to do these calculations on a spreadsheet! 

Budget Tools

With Mint, the budget app, shutting down in 2024, many users are looking for a new app to replace it. Empower offers budget tools similar to Mint.

With Empower, you can set monthly budgets and track how much you’re spending in different categories. 

Planning Tools

No budget app is complete without tools for planning! Empower offers multiple free tools like a retirement planner, savings planner, retirement fee analyzer, and investment checkup. 

There are so many different tools that Empower offers to elevate your financial planning to the next level!

How Much It Costs

Unlike other budget apps, Empower is FREE! Other budget apps may charge a monthly subscription for very similar features that Empower offers, but Empower really offers everything (and more) you’d need to get your finances in order.

However, Empower may reach out to you to offer their services through licensed financial advisors. Luckily, they are very transparent with their fee and won’t try to sell you expensive investments.

Investors will incur a fee of 0.89% a year of the first million dollars in assets under management. After the first million dollars in assets, the fee goes down to 0.79% for the first $3 million, 0.69% on the next $2 million, etc. 

You can always decline the services if you don’t feel like you need to. I receive a call maybe once a year and tell them I’m not interested at all. I continue to use the app for free very frequently! 

Final Thoughts

Empower packs A LOT of features into a single app. What’s crazy is that it’s free! 

Paying a subscription for a budget app seems almost counterproductive when most people should be getting rid of subscriptions if they need a budget app, but I digress. Whatever works towards hitting their goals, right?

Empower is more than enough for anyone to get a handle of their budget and offers tools so that users can build wealth so the app still works as people grow their net worth. 

Personally, I stopped using budget apps years ago because I outgrew the need to. Once my income grew, keeping a budget became less important. An additional $100 spend on groceries wouldn’t break my wallet, but it would improve my quality of life. However, I still use Empower to track my net worth and monthly cash flow!