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Empower, previously known as Personal Capital and owned by Empower Annuity Insurance Company of America, is a comprehensive financial planning and wealth management platform offering robust free tools for tracking and analyzing personal finances. It aggregates all your financial accounts—banking, investments, credit cards, and real estate—into a single dashboard to provide a holistic view of your net worth. The platform primarily supports a workflow of monitoring investment performance, analyzing spending patterns, and planning for retirement using powerful calculators. Empower is accessible via a web application and dedicated mobile apps for iOS and Android, ensuring continuous access to your financial picture. Its most used free feature is the Net Worth Tracker, which provides a real-time summary of all assets and liabilities. All financial data is securely linked and aggregated in the cloud, providing read-only access to your accounts for analysis.
Why It’s Useful
Empower eliminates the guesswork and manual effort involved in understanding your overall financial health, especially across diverse investment portfolios. For the serious investor, it provides detailed portfolio analysis, fee analyzer, and investment checkups to identify hidden costs and optimize asset allocation. For anyone planning for retirement, its free Retirement Planner tool offers powerful projections and scenario analysis, helping to ensure they are on track to meet their goals. The core financial tools, including net worth tracking, budgeting, and investment analysis, are entirely free and provide significant value without any obligation to use their paid advisory services. Compared to basic budgeting apps, Empower excels in its investment-focused analytics and robust financial planning calculators, offering a much deeper dive into wealth management. The "Fee Analyzer" feature, which identifies hidden fees in investment accounts, is a powerful differentiator for experienced investors. A non-technical person can link their primary bank and investment accounts and see their net worth in under 5 minutes.
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