Almost 5 years ago, I promised you that we’d eventually write a Personal Capital review on this blog. Since then, the service has changed names to “Empower Personal Dashboard” (or, more elusively, “Empower Personal Wealth”) — but after all this time, it’s remained free and great to use. And most people still just call it Personal Capital. 😛
Part of the reason we’ve procrastinated writing this blog post is that it’s not rocket science. If you’re looking for the best personal finance software to easily see all your accounts in one place, you can skip reading my Personal Capital review below — just sign up and try it yourself. It takes like 10 minutes, and it’s free. You’ve got nothing to lose.
But for those who need further convincing, let’s finally talk about it…
Note: This article includes some affiliate links. If you click one and make a purchase or sign up for a service, we’ll get a small commission. 100% of our affiliate profits go to charity, and we never let these affiliate relationships affect our recommendations (learn more).
Empower Personal Dashboard as a Free Wealth Tracker App
Way back in 2014, I started helping my mom calculate her net worth once a month. Net worth is the single most important number that everyone should track to get a sense of their overall financial situation through time.
Unfortunately, it can be pretty time-consuming to do when you’ve accumulated a bunch of different accounts over a lifetime like my mom. I spent nearly an hour each month logging into each one and adding the balances together. That’s when I found Personal Capital (which is now called Empower Personal Dashboard) and signed her up.
As soon as we started using Personal Capital for wealth tracking, the time it took to calculate her net worth each month was cut by about 75% — and time is money! 😉
Since then, Lauren and I have used Empower Personal Dashboard to track our own net worth too, and we’ve never looked back (though we do still enter the results into our own custom spreadsheet each month, for the sake of backups and consistent recordkeeping).
To set up your personal finance dashboard for the first time, you’ll need to link all of your existing financial accounts to Empower. This includes checking/savings accounts, investment/retirement accounts, credit cards, loans, and anything else you can think of.
Fortunately, Empower has software relationships with nearly every financial institution (at least in the US), so the linking process is usually pretty quick and smooth. Nicknames can be given to each account to improve readability, too.
You can also include the street address of your home and any investment properties you may own, and their market values will automatically be added into your net worth according to their Zillow Zestimate. Pretty neat!
With that said, there’s almost always something you’ll have to set up manually. Fortunately, the platform gives you plenty of flexibility to do so.
Empower Personal Dashboard lets you add manual entries for stuff like obscure accounts that fail to link, any physically held alternative investments, the cash under your mattress, or the thousand bucks you owe to your poker buddies. You’ll have to update these balances yourself whenever you want a truly accurate net worth calculation though.
Linked accounts also need to be re-linked once in a while, for security or technical reasons. If your financial institution ever requires it, Empower will prompt you to re-enter your login credentials or perform a two-factor authentication. Some banks are more annoying about this than others.
For these reasons, calculating your net worth won’t always be instant speed with Empower Personal Dashboard. But trust me — it’ll be way, way faster than doing it yourself.
4 Personal Capital Features We Love
The best free personal finance software should be cross-platform. As weirdo Linux users ourselves, we were super happy to find out that Empower Personal Dashboard works on any device or operating system because it’s available as a web app.
For example, instead of needing a special “Personal Capital for Mac” or “Personal Capital for Windows,” you can just access your wealth tracking dashboard directly through the Empower website, without needing to actually install any software on your device.
Empower also has dedicated Android and iOS apps, but I personally prefer to use the web app on my laptop or desktop computer. It’s just nicer to see everything on a bigger screen.
While our main reason for using Empower is to track our net worth, I also appreciate that it allows you to review transactions across all your accounts in a single place. Instead of logging into separate credit card and bank accounts to scan for fraudulent transactions, I can just browse the “Transactions Overview” on our Personal Dashboard once a month instead. It even shows things like interest payments and dividends in our investment accounts!
Another cool feature is the Portfolio Allocation screen, which reads all the holdings across your investment accounts and aggregates them into categories like “US stocks,” “international stocks,” “US bonds,” etc. — allowing you to get a sense of your overall asset allocation.
The portfolio allocation feature is useful, but it’s not perfect. While it does a great job aggregating securities in your brokerage and retirement accounts, it won’t include the real estate properties you’ve linked as a part of your asset mix.
You can hack it to do this in an inconvenient way using manual investment entries, but an ideal asset allocation calculator would automatically include all assets — and would properly account for leverage as well.
The most recent feature we’ve appreciated is the addition of Empower Personal Cash, which offers a competitive interest rate on a high-yield savings account. Like any other good HYSA, Empower Personal Cash is FDIC insured and can connect to your existing accounts for easy transfers.
Feel free to open a Personal Cash account while setting up your Empower Personal Dashboard, or if you’re already stashing cash in another good HYSA or money market fund, just stick with that and link it to Empower.
Features We Don’t Use: Personal Capital Budgeting
We’re notoriously strange in the financial independence community because we have never kept a budget, and we don’t really track our spending very carefully, either.
If you want an opinion on the best free budget software, or you’re wondering about using Personal Capital to budget — I’m probably not the right guy to ask. I’d rather be honest than give a fake recommendation here, so I’ll just tell you what I know…
Does Personal Capital have a budget feature? Yes, absolutely. And since the software has direct access to transactions across all your accounts, it should be able to do a great job of tracking your spending.
I clicked the “Budgeting” tab of our Personal Dashboard for the first time ever while writing this review, and it magically sorted all of our recent credit card charges into categories like “groceries,” “restaurants,” “automotive,” “taxes,” and even “charitable giving” automatically — producing a nice bar graph.
I immediately noticed some things that it couldn’t parse, like a check I wrote, which it simply categorized under “checks” (not useful), and a transfer from one account to another that it categorized as an expense (dead wrong). But with a couple of clicks, I was able to recategorize the transactions manually.
It seems pretty easy, so try it yourself if you like! I just can’t be bothered…
Is Personal Capital Safe?
Before entering the passwords to all your financial accounts into a single website, you might be wondering: Is Personal Capital legit? Should I trust them with so much info?
Well first, here’s the anecdotal answer: My mom, Lauren, and myself have collectively been using Personal Capital (aka Empower Personal Dashboard) since 2019, and nothing bad has happened to any of us. It’s just saved us all a lot of tedious tabulation hours.
Here are a few more assurances:
- The Empower website uses the same types of encryption and Internet security protocols used by your bank’s website. If you feel secure using online banking, you should probably feel reasonably secure using Empower.
- You can’t place trades or withdraw money from linked accounts within your Empower Personal Dashboard. It’s essentially “read-only.” If someone hacked into your Empower account, they could see how much money you have, but they couldn’t take any of it (except maybe from accounts directly held with Empower, like Empower Personal Cash).
- Even if someone hacked the Empower server itself and managed to recover the credentials to your bank accounts directly, most financial institutions insure customers against fraudulent transactions.
At the end of the day, nothing in this world is 100% safe, but personally, I don’t worry too much about it.
Personal Capital Advisors Are Decent — But Very Expensive
Some things in this world really are free — like the blog you’re reading right now. But before you accept anything without paying for it, you should at least stop and consider why it’s free. After all, Empower is a successful, 133-year-old, multi-billion-dollar mega corporation — not a charity.
One of the main ways Empower generates revenue from free personal finance software like the Personal Dashboard wealth tracker is to use it as a lead generator for their investment advisors.
Soon after signing up with Empower, you should expect a few emails and phone calls from them. I’ll be honest here: I didn’t want any help from a financial advisor, so I completely ignored them until one day they offered me $100 cash to listen to their advice.
I was expecting a thick sales pitch, but I was pleasantly surprised. My Personal Capital advisor was nice, knowledgeable, and not too pushy. He presented me with an investment plan that was (at least at first glance) pretty reasonable.
But here’s the problem: The investment portfolio he suggested for us was basically just a slightly more complicated version of the one we already have, with an annual management fee tacked on. And those added complications weren’t likely to produce any extra returns over the long run.
As of 2024, Empower’s Wealth Management fees range between 0.49% – 0.89% of assets. That may not sound like a lot, but over a lifetime, it can add up to a huge amount of money through the power of compounding. That’s one of the fundamental problems with percentage-based financial advisor fees.
For example, if you start with an initial investment of $100k and contribute $25k more per year for 30 years, earning an 8% annualized gross return, then a fee of just 0.49% comes to four hundred thousand dollars. Does that seem like a fair price to pay for financial advice?
If you need advice, feel free to speak to an advisor from Empower. See what they have to say. Their suggestions aren’t terrible, and they won’t charge you anything up-front. But understand that their fee structure is one of the most expensive over the long run, and you’d probably be much better off paying a flat fee to a fiduciary financial advisor instead — or simply learning the ropes yourself and investing without an advisor (like we did!).
Signing up for Empower wealth management is definitely much better than keeping all of your money in a savings account or under a mattress, but there are far better alternatives, so I can’t really recommend using the Personal Capital advisors — at least not long-term.
Empower is a class act though: If you decline to use their wealth management service, they will stop calling you about it and allow you to continue using their free personal finance dashboard indefinitely. Pretty nice.
— Steven
Things change over time. We keep a constantly updated list of our favorite financial services on our Recommendations page.
