Empower Personal Dashboard‪™‬ 4+

I have been been using for over 2 years and I have to say I use it daily. The mobile app is fast to load and easily understandable. Having this quick access to all of my financial accounts make it easy.
After having had-to replace several credit cards and having had someone apply for a personal loan in my name I decided to finally do something to decrease my vulnerability to scams and schemes. I good friend who is a cyber security expert recommended I implement a 3 tier plan.
1. Put a hold with all 3 credit agencies on releasing your credit scores. This then prevents thieves snooping to see if you have money and applying for loans in your name.
2. Sign up for a reputable password vault and use it. There several good ones.
3. Finally sign up for empower. It is free. They really are an investment company that wants you to use there services but provides this one stop view of your financial health and safety. Unlike Fisher investments who promised not to bug me when I signed up for some free literature bugged my secretary for weeks until she insisted I take the call and tell them to bug off. I have been contacted once by empowered. Quick sales pitch and when I explained investing was my hobby so no thanks she said it looks like I was doing it well and wished me luck. No further calls. That impressed me to the point that I recommended them to my wife in my “instructions for finances when I am demented or dead” note as she has 0 interest in investing.

Incredibly favorable dashboards and visualizations, better than any other for personally finance. I’m also a user of Mint (which is also good), and overall prefer Personal Capital. The investment allocation breakdowns are great, and intelligent recommendations are readily listed, though I wish that some better additional learning resources were immediately available within the app, tied to those intelligent recommended actions.

One incredible service that the app provides is free fiduciary services for users with over $100k in financial holdings. That has been a very nice surprise, and makes me feel even more confident that Personal Capital is in the user’s corner—I would have expected more predatory non-fiduciary financial advisor services, or a fee for service.

My only complaint is that Venmo constantly thinks that my account—which has been connected to the Personal Capital app, I believe through Plaid—is being hacked. I done have this issue with any of the other connected accounts I have with other financial institutions. It’s annoying, and paranoia inducing, but overall the app offers an incredible amount of value.

I read a lot of online reviews of financial software offerings before I found Personal Capital. I love that I can get a big picture overview of my net worth, determine if I’m saving enough for my child’s education, if I’m saving enough for retirement, and seeing an aggregate of all my investments in one place. Also, like that it tracks my spending so I know how I well I’m keeping to a budget each month. In the past, I’ve tried tracking my finances using iBank, but it didn’t update automatically very well and was a lot of work to maintain. Personal Capital automatically updates everything. A few drawbacks is not everything could be connected. For example, I couldn’t get my US Savings bonds to connect. I do like getting daily cash flow reports in my email. It allows me to easily confirm what I’ve spent on things before I’ve forgotten about them. Would definitely recommend this app and the desktop app as well. I ended up opening some accounts with Personal Capital/Empower after meeting with the investment advisor. So far earnings have been okay, but they appear to be on par with the economy at the moment. The meetings with the personal advisor have definitely been worthwhile and they provide very professional webinars on the current state of the economy as well.