Empower Investment Checkup Tool: Your Journey to Financial Wellness

Staying on track and clearly viewing your financial picture is a challenging task. What with all the constantly moving parts:

• Setting up a budget
• Tracking and reviewing expenses
• Making investment decisions
• Regularly evaluating your net worth 

Do you need to better grasp your spending, make sense of your budget, or even check your credit score? Financial planning and investment checkup software can be a great way to take control of your finances.

Personal finance software will alleviate the burden of dealing with numerous spreadsheets and documents and help you build better money-handling habits. 

Whether you want to have difficulty monitoring your spending or you need a more transparent understanding of your finances, we introduce you to Empower, one of the hottest financial technology products in the market today. 

This review takes a deep dive into the one platform you can depend on. We explore how Empower works, including how to build wealth by getting control of your finances today.     

Empower is a wealth management platform formerly known as Personal Capital that employs a combination of robo-advisor algorithms and in-person financial advisors to offer a holistic investment approach.

The company enables users to track their investments and financial health, offers a paid wealth management service and a wide range of free financial tools. Empower enables users to keep an eye on their financial health while allowing them to get a 360-degree view of their money. 

The platform has tools to help users with processes like budgeting, investment portfolio analysis, and the creation of financial roadmaps. Furthermore, you can use the firm’s wealth management service to make a personal investment and work directly with an experienced financial advisor to customize your investment portfolio.  

Whether you’re a newbie or an old hand who regularly does their money check-ins but is looking for a different tool, Empower’s list of financial tools and calculators could be just what you and your family have been looking for.  

Empower Primary Offerings 

Empower users can enjoy the following three primary offerings: 

Free Financial Dashboard

Empower’s free financial dashboard is a tool that lets users link their accounts for easier money management and tracking of their investment portfolio from a single online location. A consumer will gain access to this dashboard as soon as they sign up for an empower account. 

The list of tools available with this offering budgeting can help users with education planning, cash flows, investment planning, budgeting, and retirement savings, among others. 

Cash Management Account 

The Empower Personal Cash account is another one of the other free products offering high-yield cash management, offering an FDIC insurance cover of up to $2 million. This cash holding account doesn’t yet accept debit cards, but the firm says this is still a work in progress.   

Wealth Management Services

The wealth management service is a tiered offering available for users with a minimum account balance of $100,000. This is currently the only service on the platform where users are asked to deposit funds, as the Empower personal cash and financial dashboard are accessible to all users.  

How Empower Works 

The process of setting up Empower isn’t rocket science, and it’s relatively fast. Once you sign up for an account and log into their website, you can immediately connect all your financial accounts, including bank accounts, credit cards, mortgages, investments, and other accounts. 

Once you’re logged in, the process of connecting accounts entails entering your personal information, and the software does the rest. The platform secures users’ information using high-grade security and encryption processes as expected from your regular bank. 

Your secure information is on the same level as your account information with your online banker or investor. Moreover, your investible assets will continue to grow as you add accounts, and once you hit the $100,000 mark, a member of the Empower team will contact you.

In this way, Empower differs from the competition because of its added money management component, which goes beyond regular personal investing.     

Wealth Management 

Between a regular robo-advisor and an investment firm, Empower uses computer programs and algorithms to create and manage user portfolios. Besides, they have human financial advisors who offer personalized investment advice in three tiers based on their unique needs.   

Tier#1: Investment Services: The Investment service is designed for users having between $100,000 and $200,000 in assets who receive unlimited financial planning and retirement advice from advisors. 

Tier#2: Wealth Management: Users with an account balance between $200,000 and $1 million are each assigned two financial advisors. Besides, they can consult specialists in insurance, tax, real estate, and stock options. 

Tier #3: Private Client: Anyone who accumulates assets worth over $1 million unlocks this tier, offering exclusive services, including bond and equity investment, legacy portfolio construction, and lower fees beginning at $3 million.  

Asset Allocation

With experts believing that asset allocation accounts for over 90% of an investor’s ROI and is the single most significant determinant of portfolio performance, you want to avoid the pitfalls of improper asset allocation. 

Empower’s tool analyzes your linked account and the information you provide about your goals to give you an easy-to-read graph highlighting your current allocation compared to your true potential.  

The Empower app analyzes your investment portfolio holdings and rates them according to size, style, and economic sector to help you discover ways to receive ROI and avoid investment pitfalls. 

The platform shows your target allocation, highlighting areas of your portfolio you can improve on, and alternative asset allocation results created from the answers you gave during the investment checkup.   

Past Performance Analyzing

The Empower Investment Checkup tool also offers a visual display showing a side-by-side comparison of a user’s current portfolio. It makes recommendations based on the terms of your projected retirement savings, historical performance, and risk/return ratios. 

You could use the information provided to fine-tune your target allocation from your initial allocation based on whether you need to adopt a more aggressive or conservative investment approach. 

Portfolio Risk Assessment

The Investment Checkup tool offers free insights regarding optimizing your portfolio allocation to grow your wealth. 

Empower offers valuable information, such as the exact amount of money you need to invest in rebalancing your portfolio to minimize risk and maximize return on investment, besides offering you a future projection of your portfolio and what you can expect to earn as an annual return.    

Goal Tracking

Along with the investment benefits, Empower’s free savings planner tool lets you see your total savings to help you remain on track with your saving and retirement goals. The tool is also designed to assist you in making any necessary changes when it detects veering off your set goals. 

The platform facilitates emergency find savings by calculating the amount of money needed during a 3-6 month emergency based on your monthly budget to suggest what you’d need during that timeframe. 

There’s also a retirement saving goal, which the tool calculates, plus a debt down tool displaying all your debts and their interest rates and giving you an idea of the estimated payment length until you become debt-free. The benefit of this tool is that it helps with emergency preparation, target savings, and debt management. 

Mobile App

The Empower Dashboard has an App, the mobile version of the desktop dashboard, which you can access while moving. The mobile app will help you view summaries of your accounts, including your total assets, income, expenses, and cash flow.  

The app also comes in handy with lists of all your transactions, budget and spending breakdown, total investment overview, investment checkup advice, and portfolio performance chats without forgetting the value of your projected retirement portfolio.  

While the app won’t display all the platform’s advanced features like the fee analyzer and bill reminders, it remains an excellent way to keep track of your finances from anywhere. 

Data Security and Privacy

If you’re wondering whether Empower is safe and your data is secure, the answer is a resounding yes. The platform has implemented various security measures to safeguard users’ personal and financial information. 

Besides putting in place several authentication protocols for the devices you use via phone calls, email, or SMS messages, some safety features Empower has put in place include:   

Data encryption: Empower secures all data using AES-256 encryption, which the U.S. military also uses. 

Multifactor authentication: You can secure your mobile devices using biometric authentication or your accounts via multifactor authentication.   

Security bounty program: The platform runs a bounty program that rewards any hacker who finds and reports a potential security weakness to Empower. 

Fraud monitoring: Users can receive a daily email transaction monitor to spot any suspicious transactions.   

With measures like the one mentioned here, you can rest assured that Empower’s Investment Checkup tool is safe enough to give users the peace of mind they require. 

How to Get Started 

If you’re convinced that the Empower Investment Checkup Tool is right for you, we’ll show you the simple process of signing up. 

Step#1: Sign Up for an Account: You must provide your email address and phone number and create a password. 

Step#2: Fill up a Questionnaire: You’ll answer a few simple questions regarding your financial and retirement goals. 

Step#3: Link and Sync Your Accounts: Connect all your external financial accounts, including the checking accounts, investments and CDs, revenue, and any investment accounts. You’ll have immediate access to numerous free tools and calculators. 

Step#4: Seek for Free consultation: If your assets exceed $100,000, you can try the wealth management service. An Empower financial advisor team member will likely call you to schedule an appointment. 

After reviewing your current financial status, your plans and goals, and risk tolerance, the advisor will, in a follow-up consultation, propose your personalized investment strategy. 

The call will likely cover how to create a tax-efficient portfolio, insights on cash flow and budgeting, and advice on diversification.  

Step#5: Open an Investment Account: If you’re happy with the proposal, the next step is opening and funding an investment account. However, if you decide Empower’s investment advice isn’t for you, you can still use the free consultation and advice you received to make alternative plans.

Is Empower Right for You?

The entire structure of Empower’s Investment Checkup tool makes a lot of sense. Moreover, their free financial dashboard presents a comprehensive set of tools that can replace a financial advisor for someone who can’t afford to hire one. There are at least three significant benefits for anyone falling into this group: 

Real-time Data: The Empower Investment Planner doesn’t work using assumptions. The accurate data gleaned from your information and retirement accounts calculates and shows you if you’re on track to accomplish your desired goals within the available timelines.   

Customization: The Empower tool enables you to evaluate the impact of a wide range of activities, from college to taking a mortgage and everything in between, on your financial goals 

Discover Hidden Fees: Empower features a Fee Analyzer that probes the different schemes involved to uncover hidden investment fees you’re paying on your numerous financial accounts without your explicit knowledge.  

Since there’s every chance you’ll accumulate some money as you progress in your life and career, an investment plan is the best way to build wealth. As your investments grow, in size and complexity over time, there reaches a point when you need an expert to help you handle them. 

That’s where the Empower Investment Checkup Tool comes into play, and you need to consider signing up to take advantage of its many free and advanced offerings. Nonetheless, the $100,000 minimum threshold means only high-net-worth individuals can benefit from their supreme offering.  

The Bottom Line 

Empower offers a practical suite of financial planning tools, especially if you have serious plans for your future investment and retirement. The best part is that its money management tools, some of which are among the best in the market, are free of charge.

Since there’s nothing to lose in signing up for a free account, you may want to try it out and get a handle on your financial and investment life. Empower’s portfolio analysis tools are also a must-try for anyone desirous of understanding their holdings, particularly for people holding more than one account with several brokers.  

As you grow and advance your investments up different tiers, Empower is the tool you need due to its advanced wealth management features. 

If you want to avoid the pain of regretting making quick, irrational investment decisions, you had better join modern groups of investors using investment tools to learn about investing. 

While the wealth management feature could be more expensive than the competition, Empower is an excellent platform to help you receive investment guidance and learn to manage your entire financial life from one platform.