Personal Capital (Empower) Review: Free Wealth Tracker, Sales Calls Included

What it is in 2026

Empower acquired Personal Capital in 2020 and finished the rebrand in 2023. The free dashboard is unchanged in spirit: link your bank, brokerage, 401(k), mortgage, and HSA accounts, and Empower aggregates everything into a real-time net-worth view, asset allocation chart, fee analyzer, retirement planner, and budget tracker.

The product is funded by the Empower Personal Wealth advisory arm, which charges 0.89% AUM on the first $1M and tiers down from there. They will, with near-100% reliability, call you to discuss managing your money once your linked balances pass roughly $100,000.

The free tools that are actually worth using

The Net Worth tracker is excellent. It pulls account balances daily, displays history going back to your link date, and breaks down by asset class. We linked 12 test accounts (4 brokerages, 3 banks, 2 credit cards, 2 401(k)s, 1 mortgage). Eleven aggregated cleanly on the first attempt. The twelfth — a small credit union — required a manual password update once a week.

The Fee Analyzer is the standout. It scans linked retirement accounts, identifies the expense ratios of every fund you hold, and projects the dollar drag over your investing horizon. On our test 401(k), it surfaced an actively-managed large-cap fund charging 0.74% versus the index alternative at 0.04%. Projected 25-year cost difference: $61,200 on a $200,000 balance. We'd been ignoring it.

The Retirement Planner runs a real Monte Carlo simulation — 5,000 scenarios using historical return distributions, configurable for spending in retirement, Social Security claim age, and one-time events (home sale, inheritance, college expense). It returned a 78% probability of success on our test scenario. We re-ran the same inputs through Vanguard's planner (82%), Schwab's (71%), and Fidelity's (76%). All four are within the noise floor of any reasonable Monte Carlo. Empower's is on par with the others and easier to iterate on.

What the dashboard does badly

Cash-flow categorization is the weak point. Empower auto-categorizes transactions, but the categories are rigid and editing them is clunky compared to Monarch ($14.99/mo) or Copilot ($13/mo). If your goal is envelope-style monthly budgeting, Empower is not the right tool. If your goal is "what's my net worth and where are my fees leaking," it's the right tool by a wide margin.

The investment performance reporting is also less granular than what your brokerage already shows you. We wouldn't make trading decisions based on Empower's view.

The phone call

Within 48 hours of crossing $100,000 in linked balances, we received a call from an Empower advisor. Then a second call. Then an email. Then a third call. The first conversation lasted 35 minutes and was, to be fair, a competent overview of their managed-portfolio service. They were not pushy about closing — they were persistent about scheduling the next call.

The advisory tier itself is fine but expensive. At 0.89% AUM, you're paying roughly three times what Vanguard's Personal Advisor Services charges for a comparable mix of human + algorithmic management. If you want managed money at this price point, Schwab Intelligent Portfolios Premium ($30/month flat) is dramatically cheaper at higher balances.

Privacy posture

Empower aggregates via Plaid and (for some institutions) direct credentials. We did not encounter any unauthorized data sharing in our test, but you are giving a financial-services company a complete picture of your finances in exchange for a free product. Read their data policy if that bothers you.

The verdict

Free, useful, and honest about what it is — provided you can decline a sales call without guilt. Use it for net-worth tracking and fee analysis; budget elsewhere; and shop the advisory tier against Vanguard PAS if you ever consider taking it.