Empower Budgeting App Review 2024 (2024)

Empower’s Personal Dashboard is a free budgeting and financial tracking tool that helps users view their overall financial picture and plan for the future. Empower also owns a leading robo-advisor service for higher net worth individuals. It launched its personal dashboard service after acquiring Personal Capital in 2020.

Customers can use Empower’s Personal Dashboard for free without becoming an investing client, although Empower still promotes its wealth management services within the dashboard.

Empower’s Personal Dashboard stands out due to its comprehensive toolset and lack of fees. This is one of the top budgeting apps if you:

• Want a holistic view of your finances
• Want an effective way to track your net worth
• Want to lower your retirement and investing fees
• Don’t want to spend money on another budgeting app
• Want to forecast different financial scenarios to plan your retirement
• Have alternative assets you want to track (cryptocurrencies, real estate, artwork, gold, etc.)
• Like digging into your cash flow, monthly spending and bills for a deeper understanding of where your money goes

Once you create an Empower Personal Dashboard account with your email, you link your bank and investment accounts to the dashboard to consolidate your financial data into a single interface. Once that’s done, you can take advantage of the numerous tools Empower offers.

Budget Planner

Budgeting tools are at the forefront. For starters, Empower’s Budget Planner section records all of your transactions and organizes them by category. You can create up to 30 custom categories as well. Users can then track spending and create savings goals to stay on track. Empower breaks down your top spending categories, making it easier to spot potential areas of overspending.

Savings Planner

Another powerful section of the dashboard is Empower’s Savings Planner. This area has tools like Empower’s Retirement Planner, which lets you run scenarios with different annual savings rates to see if you’ll reach your retirement goals. It factors in your current savings, yearly savings, marital status, location and other considerations.

The Savings Planner section also has an emergency fund tool. This feature monitors your cash accounts to help ensure you’ve saved enough to cover three to six months of expenses.

Debt Paydown

You can add debts like loans and mortgages to the Debt Paydown tool for a breakdown of outstanding debts and your annual change in amounts owed.

Investments

Finally, your Empower Personal Dashboard has a robust investing section. If you link your brokerage account to your dashboard, you’ll get a breakdown of your portfolio balances by account. Empower displays your holdings and makes it easy to view performance over different time frames. Furthermore, Empower classifies holdings or lets you add manual classifications. It even lets you track cryptocurrencies and alternative assets such as real estate and gold.

To top it all off, Empower lets you track your net worth and breaks the math down by account and type. This makes it easy to track your wealth-building progress in a single dashboard. We like that Empower also classifies accounts so you can see how well you’re diversified across investments, cash and other assets versus liabilities.

Many budgeting tools stick to basic budget breakdowns and spending alerts. What makes Empower’s budgeting app stand out is its use of scenarios, charts and cash flow tables to personalize your budget and forecast your financial future.

This is best demonstrated by its Savings and Retirement Planner tools. Users input data, such as their current savings, annual savings rate, desired retirement age and desired retirement spending per year. Empower also asks for information about your household’s composition, where you live, if you want to include Social Security income and other factors. Based on your responses, Empower provides a percentage probability that you’re on track to hit your savings and retirement goals.

With each scenario, you gain a better understanding of real financial changes you can make and how they might impact your future. You can save scenarios you create to your dashboard, making it easy to compare a few likely scenarios against one another.

You access your Empower Personal Dashboard via the web. Your dashboard lets you add over 16,000 financial institutions, so you can link numerous accounts to get a full picture of your finances. The web version provides a complete overview of your linked accounts and all the features Empower has to offer.

Alternatively, you can download the Empower Personal Dashboard app on your phone. Its Android app has a 4.1-star rating, and its iOS app has a 4.7-star rating. The mobile experience lets you track your accounts, view your budgets and spending breakdowns and use retirement planning tools. However, a few mobile features, like an investment checkup and viewing investment performance, are missing.

Some recent reviews on the Google Play Store complain that transactions aren’t always automatically tracked. Furthermore, some users complain that their bank accounts won’t connect and sync correctly or that Empower struggles to sync multiple accounts.

Empower doesn’t charge any fees to use its personal dashboard. This is because Empower makes its money through the wealth management side of the business, which is open to clients with at least $100,000 to invest and does charge fees.

A free dashboard with as many tools as Empower is a strong selling point. However, if you want to unlock premium features, like specific investment advice or access to Empower’s Advisory Team, you need to open a wealth management account.

Signing up takes relatively little time and involves just four simple steps:

1. Create an Empower Personal Dashboard account by entering your name, email and password.
2. Enter your ZIP code and phone number.
3. Outline your main financial goals, such as tracking net worth, creating budgeting goals and feeling confident about retirement.
4. Link your bank and brokerage accounts to Empower.

Linking all of your accounts is worthwhile if you want the most comprehensive data possible, and the process is easy. Empower works with thousands of financial institutions, and you can also link popular investment apps like Robinhood.

Once you select an institution, you log in with your username and password, so Empower can access your data. Empower uses Yodlee to access financial data securely and automatically syncs it to your dashboard. The more accounts you link, the more data you get.

Note that in Forbes Advisor’s testing of Empower’s Personal Dashboard, we were asked to schedule a call with an Empower Advisor when signing up. This step was unskippable, or at the very least, our team couldn’t find a way to opt out of this introductory call. You may experience similar upsells to Empower’s other services, but you’re not obligated to use them.

We like the Empower budgeting app if you want an in-depth net worth tracker and love digging into data and different financial forecasts. However, several alternatives are worth considering, depending on your goals and budgeting style.

Empower vs. YNAB

YNAB, or You Need A Budget, is our pick for the best budgeting app for setting goals. That’s because the app works by assigning every dollar a job, from moving money into savings to paying down debt. If you’re still learning how to budget and want a structured approach to saving, it’s a useful app to have.

That said, YNAB doesn’t have in-depth investment tracking tools like Empower’s Personal Dashboard. Additionally, YNAB costs $14.99 per month or $8.25 per month if you prepay annually.

Empower vs. Monarch Money

Monarch Money is our pick for the top Mint alternative. Like Empower, it helps you track all of your account balances, investments and transactions in a central platform. You can create custom budget categories, add a partner or financial advisor to your account, and get useful diagrams that break down your finances.

Monarch Money also provides investment tracking similar to Empower. It’s an excellent choice if you want more robust budgeting tools and customization options than what you get with Empower. However, Empower wins on net worth tracking. Pricing is also worth considering since Monarch Money costs $14.99 per month or $8.33 per month if you prepay annually.

Empower vs. PocketGuard

PocketGuard is our pick for the best budgeting app for tracking spending. The app has numerous features that help you keep track of bills and stay on top of your budget goals. It also lets you use three popular budgeting methods: envelope budgeting, zero-based bugeting and 50/30/20 budgeting. Plus, the app provides automatic spending insights and useful spending category pie charts to help outline your habits.

Empower’s Personal Dashboard provides a more holistic view of your finances and future plans. In contrast, PocketGuard aims to help reduce overspending and ensure you know where your money goes each month. PocketGuard costs $12.99 per month or $6.25 per month if you prepay annually.