In the modern financial landscape, managing multiple accounts across different institutions can quickly become an overwhelming administrative burden. From checking and savings accounts to credit cards, mortgages, auto loans, and complex retirement portfolios like 401(k)s and IRAs, keeping a cohesive eye on one’s overall financial health is a significant challenge. To address this friction, financial management tools have evolved to aggregate disparate data points into a single, unified interface. Among the most prominent options in this category is Empower, a comprehensive financial tool formerly known as Personal Capital. Having been utilized by long-term financial commentators and everyday consumers alike for years, the platform offers a robust suite of digital features designed to help users make the most of their money from a centralized dashboard.

Quick Take

Empower delivers a complete view of an individual’s finances in one convenient location. The platform automatically synchronizes checking, savings, credit card, loan, investment, and mortgage accounts, providing a real-time snapshot of net worth and overall financial health. Core functionalities include cash flow and net worth tracking, investment tracking, and detailed retirement planning. Furthermore, its advanced investment tracking suite incorporates asset allocation analysis, an investment fee evaluation, and a comprehensive investment checkup. Best of all, the core digital dashboard and its robust tools are provided completely free of charge, supported commercially by the company’s optional paid wealth management and advisory services. Consumer reception on major mobile platforms reflects its utility, holding a high rating of 4.8 out of 5 stars based on hundreds of thousands of reviews in the Apple App Store, and a solid 4 out of 5 stars on Google Play.

Getting Started with Empower

The process of utilizing Empower begins by signing up for a free account online or through the mobile application. Once registered, users are prompted to connect their various financial accounts. While the platform is widely recognized for its exceptional investment tracking and analytical capabilities, seasoned users often recommend linking every available financial touchpoint, including traditional bank accounts, credit cards, loans, mortgages, and even residential real estate. For real estate assets, Empower integrates with property data services like Zillow to automatically pull in estimated home values, ensuring they are accurately reflected in total net worth calculations.

Linking accounts requires online access credentials—typically a username and password—for each respective financial institution. Users can easily search for their bank, credit union, or brokerage by name or website URL within the account-linking dialog box on the dashboard. In the rare event that a niche or local financial institution cannot be automatically synchronized, the platform allows users to enter asset and liability values manually. While a minimum of one account must be linked to initiate the dashboard, and users can manually input subsequent items, failing to connect investment and credit accounts will inherently limit the depth of the automated tracking features.

Once accounts are synchronized, completing the settings and profile sections is a critical administrative step. Accessed via the user profile menu, the settings tab allows individuals to manage email subscription preferences—such as receiving daily or weekly summaries of income, spending, and investment performance—and decide whether investment income and dividends should factor into cash flow calculations. Security configurations are also managed here, including the setup of multi-factor authentication and login alerts triggered by access attempts from foreign countries. The platform also maintains an audit log of authorized devices, enabling users to regularly prune outdated or unused hardware. Meanwhile, the profile section captures vital demographic and financial data for both the user and a spouse, including income sources, savings rates, and long-term investment objectives, all of which feed directly into the platform’s automated planning calculators.

Empower Banking, Cash Flow, and Budgeting

Beyond its heavy focus on investments, Empower offers practical day-to-day banking and cash flow utilities. The cash flow and budgeting functions provide deep transaction-level visibility into household income and expenses. Expenses are categorized automatically upon import, allowing users to drill down into specific transaction details to analyze spending habits. The reporting tool also permits customized account selection, enabling users to isolate specific segments of their financial life—such as viewing exclusively business checking and credit card accounts to track operational expenses, or filtering strictly for investment accounts to review monthly dividend and interest generation.

The budgeting feature operates differently from traditional envelope-style budgeting applications. Rather than allowing users to set rigid spending caps across dozens of granular categories, Empower establishes an overall monthly spending goal while automatically tracking and categorizing all transactions imported from linked accounts. While the system does a commendable job of categorizing everyday purchases, users typically spend a few minutes each month reviewing and correcting mislabeled transactions. To enhance organization, the platform supports custom transaction tagging. For instance, a user might assign a broad category like home maintenance while utilizing a specific tag like pool to isolate expenditures for a swimming pool without needing to establish a permanent, standalone category.

Additionally, the integration of credit cards, mortgages, and loans powers a built-in bills tracking feature. By monitoring payment due dates across linked accounts, Empower helps users avoid missed or late payments while smoothing out liquidity planning throughout the month.

Empower Investing and Crypto Tracking

Investment tracking is widely regarded as the cornerstone of the Empower platform. Once retirement and taxable brokerage accounts are successfully connected, the system automatically tracks holdings, updates asset prices throughout the trading day, monitors mutual fund expense ratios, evaluates asset allocation, and provides diagnostic portfolio tools.

The holdings view provides a granular overview of each individual asset, detailing performance metrics over various time horizons. Concurrently, the asset allocation tool evaluates a portfolio’s distribution between stocks and bonds, further breaking down asset classes into U.S. and international equities, fixed income, and alternative investments. An interactive graphical interface allows users to explore the underlying investments within each asset class with a single click, providing visibility into cash holdings hidden even within stock mutual funds.

Addressing the growing demand for digital asset management, Empower also supports the tracking of major cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin. Crucially, investors are not required to connect their private crypto wallets or surrender sensitive security keys. Instead, users can establish manual crypto accounts by specifying the token symbol, exchange, and total holding amount. Through this feature, the platform successfully tracks thousands of digital tokens across hundreds of exchanges.

Empower Planning, Savings, and Fee Analysis

The true value of the Empower dashboard extends beyond mere aggregation into forward-looking financial planning tools. The platform features a robust yet accessible retirement planner that analyzes connected investment data to project long-term financial readiness. Users can construct multiple retirement scenarios and compare them side-by-side—evaluating the impact of retiring at a traditional age versus pursuing early retirement, incorporating or excluding estimated Social Security benefits, and adjusting assumptions regarding effective tax rates, future inflation, and life expectancy.

Complementing the retirement projections is a savings planner divided into three distinct segments: retirement savings, emergency fund savings, and debt paydown. The retirement savings planner tracks annual contribution goals across tax-advantaged accounts like 401(k)s and IRAs, as well as taxable brokerage accounts, syncing directly with the broader retirement model. The emergency fund planner aggregates linked bank account balances and recommends maintaining three to six months’ worth of living expenses based on the user’s established budget. Meanwhile, the debt paydown planner consolidates mortgages, auto loans, personal loans, and interest-bearing credit card debts, displaying current balances, year-to-date balance changes, and annual percentage rates alongside graphical trend lines.

One of the platform’s most praised analytical features is the retirement fee analyzer. Because investment fees compound over decades, seemingly minor expenses—such as a 1% management fee or high mutual fund expense ratios—can quietly erode hundreds of thousands of dollars in wealth. Empower calculates a weighted average expense ratio across all linked portfolios. For example, a portfolio with an expense ratio of just 0.06% can still translate into thousands of dollars in cumulative costs over a span of several years, making the fee analyzer an invaluable diagnostic asset. Furthermore, the investment checkup tool compares a user’s actual asset allocation against a model portfolio tailored to their age, timeline, and risk tolerance, identifying specific asset classes that require rebalancing.

Security, Cost, and Platform Operations

Security remains a primary concern for users synchronizing multiple financial accounts to a digital platform. Empower addresses these concerns by employing AES-256 encryption supported by multi-layer key management, including rotating user-specific keys and salts. Furthermore, user credentials are not accessible to any individual employee at the firm, and multi-factor authentication requires users to confirm their identity via phone call, text message, or email whenever a new device attempts to access the account.

The core financial dashboard and its extensive suite of tracking, budgeting, and planning tools are provided to consumers entirely free of charge. The platform operates as a freemium model and serves as a marketing tool for Empower’s wealth management and advisory services. Users of the free dashboard may occasionally receive outreach calls from financial advisors employed by the firm. While these advisory services carry asset-based management fees starting at 0.89% for the first $1 million under management and scaling down for larger balances, utilizing the advisory services is entirely optional, and users are under no obligation to invest with the firm in order to maintain access to the free dashboard tools.