【Updated 2023.11】The personal finance tool we originally shared, Personal Capital, has been acquired by Empower and folded into its platform. After the integration, the tool is still free to use. In my experience, it seems smoother now, and linking accounts takes noticeably less time. If you use our referral link and connect an investment account with at least $1,000, you can get a $20 Amazon gift card. Accounts like Robinhood or Schwab should work.

The Referred Friend must link at least one valid investment account (e.g., brokerage, 401k or IRA) containing a balance of more than $1,000 U.S. Dollars within 30 days of registering for the Dashboard. Referred Friends must agree to Empower’s Terms of Use and the terms and conditions of the Referral Program as described in this Section. Accounts that do not qualify as valid investment accounts include bank, credit or debit card, Paypal, Stash, Acorns, Kapitall, Groundfloor, WageWorks HSA, Coinbase, digital currency exchanges, and manual investment accounts.

In addition to its free personal finance tool, Empower also offers other services, including investing and retirement management.

About Empower

As your collection of credit cards, bank accounts, and investment accounts grows, it becomes unrealistic to track every transaction by logging in to each bank separately. Today’s post introduces a very convenient financial management tool: Personal Capital, now integrated into Empower.

You can connect your bank accounts, credit cards, and investment accounts to its free financial dashboard, then view all of your accounts, transactions, and payment due dates in one place. You can also use its spending and budgeting features to better plan your expenses. On top of that, investment accounts can be managed in one centralized view: the system lists the stocks and other investment products in each account, automatically calculates your portfolio allocation, and compares it with current market conditions. It supports phones, computers, iPads, and other devices, so you can check in anytime. If you have sufficient assets, you can also use its Financial Advisor and Wealth Management services. It currently manages $11.6 Billion in assets.

One thing worth mentioning is that Yodlee is the company behind bank account verification. HSBC, Citibank, PayPal, Bank of Americ, and Amazon.com all use its data services to support multi-platform connectivity, so data security should be reliable. Your password and login information should be managed by Yodlee rather than Personal Capital.

Compared with Mint, which also offers financial management tools, Empower personal finance has a more professional-looking interface, faster loading speeds, and stronger investment management features. As a longtime Mint user, I’ve already started moving all of my accounts over to Empower personal finance.

How to Sign Up and the Signup Bonus

Right now, if you sign up for Empower through a referral link, you can get a $20 Amazon reward. To qualify, you need to link an investment account with a balance over $1,000 within 30 days. Of course, even if you don’t have that kind of account, you can still sign up and use Empower personal finance’s free management tools. Signing up does not require an SSN; phone verification is enough.

  • Empower signup link (Link an investment account with a balance over $1000 within 30 days and get a $20 Amazon gift card)

In my experience, I signed up one day and received the Amazon gift card email the next day... and it landed in the spam folder.

According to the terms, only linked investment accounts with more than $1,000 (taxable brokerage, 401k, IRA, 529) qualify for the reward. I personally linked a Schwab investment account, which happened to have $1,000 in it to complete another account opening bonus. Besides the major brokerage accounts, I would guess smaller investment accounts like Robinhood and Webull also count.

Note that investment accounts do not include: credit cards, debit cards, bank accounts, PayPal, Stash, Acorns, Kapitall, Groundfloor, WageWorks HSA, Coinbase, digital currency exchanges, and manual investment accounts.

How to Use It

Using Empower personal finance is very straightforward and easy. It doesn’t take much to get started. Here’s a quick overview of the features:

Add Accounts

After signing up for Empower personal finance, you’ll enter the main dashboard. Naturally, the first step is to add your bank and credit card accounts. You can find most banks and investment platforms, large or small. As mentioned earlier, this is just a login interface: after you enter your username and password, the information is encrypted and passed through Yodlee in the background for verification with the bank.

When linking an account for the first time, extra verification is usually required. My advice is to read the prompts carefully. Sometimes it asks for a verification code you received, sometimes your email address, and sometimes it asks you to enter 1 to choose email delivery for the code. It really varies from bank to bank.

I tested it and found that you can add your own accounts or someone else’s, so you can put the whole family’s accounts in one place for easier management.

View Your Overall Financial Picture

On the overview page, you can see all of your accounts and each card’s balance, along with charts that give you a quick snapshot of your finances. It’s a pretty intuitive and visual way to understand where you stand.

Track Every Expense and Income Transaction

Viewing transactions is the feature I use the most and rely on the most. After all, when you have nearly 30 active credit cards, it’s obviously unrealistic to keep track of them one by one. On this summary screen, it’s easy to spot suspicious charges and then go into the relevant bank account to confirm. If something really looks wrong, you can contact customer service right away.

That said, Empower personal finance shows posted transactions only, not pending ones, which is one area where it’s a bit worse than Mint.

You can also see activity across all of your investment accounts here by filtering for investment transactions. That’s pretty convenient if you have multiple investment accounts.

Check Credit Card Due Dates and Bills

If you click any card in the credit card list on the overview page, you can see all of that card’s details, including the current balance, due date, statement balance, and transactions on that card. Personally, I think it’s even clearer than what many banks provide.

If you don’t want to check cards one by one, you can also click bank-bill to see the bills for all cards in one place. For someone like me who prefers to pay manually, this helps avoid missing a due date. Still, I recommend setting up auto pay as a backup. Over roughly five or six years, I missed two payments, and both times I didn’t notice until a day later. Fortunately, banks usually don’t report that kind of situation to the credit bureaus, and Discover will even waive a late fee once.

Investment Account Management: Investing

Mint can probably provide most of the features above too, but Empower personal finance does a particularly good job with investment account management. You can compare the stocks you hold against the S&P 500 and other benchmarks.

You can also quickly understand your overall holdings and asset allocation.

This is also one of the Mint features I used frequently. If you don’t keep a budget but still want to know exactly how much you spent in a certain category over a period of time, such as groceries this month, it’s a very useful function.

Planning Features

  • Set a monthly budget: I don’t use this feature very much. I’ve set it up, but often don’t pay much attention to it. That said, it can be very useful if you want to keep tight control over your monthly budget.
  • Set financial goals: As the name suggests, this feature helps you set financial goals for self-monitoring.

Personally, I don’t really like setting all kinds of goals and budgets, because I usually don’t stick to them anyway. For relatively disciplined spenders, it’s probably more useful to focus on increasing income than to stress over spending an extra $20 on food in a given month.

Summary

Many readers here have probably already earned plenty of rewards from credit cards and investment accounts. Using Empower personal finance to keep all of those “sheep” in one place—so they don’t wander off and so you don’t lose track of them—is actually pretty helpful. Do you have any personal finance management tips of your own? Feel free to share in the comments!

How to Sign Up and the Signup Bonus