Empower is a financial management platform that’s free and simple to use. It’s centralized, making it easy to monitor your financial life.
The Empower budget app offers many features, including the ability to track your cash flow, see your net worth at a glance and more. These tools help you stick to your budget, manage investments and achieve your financial goals. The app syncs with thousands of financial accounts to make setup easy, and it offers both a mobile and web platform to manage money at home and on the go.
With our help you’ll discover whether this Mint alternative is right for you!
What Are The Key Features Of Empower’s Budget App?
Empower promises a “360-degree view of your finances,” and it delivers. Beyond seeing all your accounts at a glance, it also provides a range of tools that simplify many aspects of financial management.
In other words, it is far more than just a budget app. In fact, its strongest features are centered on investments and tracking overall wealth growth. Its budgeting tools, however, are a bit weaker than alternatives like YNAB.
Here are some of the features you can expect when you sign into your account online or start using Empower’s app.
Intuitive Budget Creation
Empower’s budgeting tool is simple. You input your desired monthly spending, link your accounts and see if you’re staying on budget.
Unfortunately, there’s no option to build a detailed monthly or annual budget where you set limits for certain categories. The app takes a broader approach. Your dashboard simply shows whether you have stayed within your overall monetary limit or not each month.
The good news is, the Empower budget app does show a summary of your spending within different categories. If you know how much you want to spend on things like travel, entertainment and medical services, it allows you to see if you’re sticking to those limits.
It just doesn’t offer a tool to set individual category spending limits or to display those limits for each category within the app itself.
Goal Setting And Tracking
Empower helps you monitor whether or not you’re on schedule to accomplish major financial goals. These can include retirement savings, building an emergency fund or paying down debt.
Something to keep in mind is that Empower doesn’t offer the option to set or track multiple financial goals, such as saving for a vacation. However, it does show you how much you must save each month to hit your retirement savings targets and whether you’re on track to do so. This can provide financial insights into some of the most important financial goals.
The retirement planner is personalized, as you input your personal info, your spouse’s info and your target retirement date.
Empower also helps you see whether your emergency fund is the right size. If it’s too small, the app suggests how much money you might want to add to your savings to prepare for unexpected expenses. If you have too much in savings, Empower suggests investing some of the money for retirement and shows you how much higher your returns could be.
The app really goes into detail in its retirement dashboard. It shows what your future Social Security benefits will be, how much income your portfolio will produce and what your final balance will be. It also makes suggestions for improving your current situation to maximize your chances of success.
Automated Savings And Investments
The Empower app’s investing tools are some of its best features. This isn’t a surprise, as the company offers investment accounts and wealth management services to clients.
Empower lets you link your investment accounts and view important details within your dashboard. You can see your total balances in taxable and nontaxable accounts, your holdings, your asset allocation and more.
The app itself doesn’t move money for you or arrange for automated contributions to investment or savings accounts though. Empower simply allows you to track your progress and see where you might want to change your investment mix.
However, it does offer investment accounts with no setup fees that allow automatic investments. The signup process for these accounts is separate from the budgeting app.
Expense Tracking And Categorization
With Empower, expense tracking is quick and effortless.
When you link your bank and credit card accounts, it imports your transactions and assigns them a specific category. You can customize these categories with a few clicks if you choose to. You can even split a transaction into different categories. For example, you can categorize whether items you bought from Lowe’s are for your home or business.
Empower also allows you to add tags to make your transactions easily searchable. For example, if you’re trying to avoid holiday overspending, you can create a tag or a customized category for that type of spending.
Within your dashboard, you can filter to see your spending by category, and see your overall spending over the course of the month. If you set a monthly spending limit, which you can do with the click of a button, a bar graph shows whether you’ve stayed on track.
With automatic categorization of your expenses, you can easily identify where your money is going and how to spend your money more wisely.
Financial Insights And Analysis
Empower helps you gain a deeper understanding of your finances. The app offers insights into your asset allocation, an overview of your cash flow and the ability to see how much you’re spending on each type of expense.
Perhaps its most helpful tool, though, is the net worth tracker on your dashboard. Net worth is equal to assets minus liabilities and it’s a great way to calculate the wealth you’re building. You can monitor your net worth over time to make sure it’s increasing. You can also see what assets and liabilities are contributing to your overall wealth-building efforts.
How Can You Benefit From Empower’s Budget App?
Want more details on how Empower’s budget app can benefit you? Here’s what you should know.
Financial Empowerment
Empower’s strongest financial empowerment features are in the investment section. After linking your investments, you’ll get a detailed report about your asset allocation and your portfolio and investment performances. This makes it very simple to see if you’re overinvested in any sectors and should rebalance.
Personal And Financial Stress Reduction
With Empower, you can reduce your financial stress because all that you need to know about every account is in one spot.
In your dashboard, you can view your top spending categories, what your cash flow looks like and how your investments are performing. You can also see whether you’re making progress on retirement savings, emergency savings and debt paydown.
Having a centralized spot to monitor all your accounts saves you a ton of time and helps you see the big picture.
Goal Achievement
Empower can help you achieve your biggest financial goals, like paying off debt, saving for retirement and saving up an emergency fund. The easy-to-visualize dials on your dashboard inspire you to keep moving forward as you monitor your efforts over time. Unfortunately, you cannot set separate additional financial goals outside of the default ones in the app.
The good news is, Empower app users have indicated that the app has helped them to achieve goals, including keeping to their budget.
Improved Financial Awareness
With Empower’s automatic categorization of your expenses, it’s easy to track how much you spend on different types of purchases. Seeing your total spending directly on your dashboard lets you know whether you’re sticking within your budget or not.
Personal Growth
Empower has one major benefit that sets it apart from other personal financial management tools. You can schedule a free call with a financial adviser who can make comprehensive recommendations. This service is available when you’ve linked accounts with more than $100,000 in assets. Your adviser can help you devise ways to switch to a growth money mindset so you can create your own money blueprints for a better future.
Empower Budget App Is A Phenomenal Mint Alternative
The Empower budget app is a comprehensive solution for tracking your spending, investments and savings. Despite its budgeting features not being as comprehensive as other apps, it still gives you the big picture of your finances. Its mobile and web platforms can help you accomplish financial goals and serve as an incredible alternative to Mint.
FAQ
Is The Empower Budget App Legit?
Empower is a legitimate budgeting app that has received solid reviews from customers, including iOS app users.
Is Empower Really Free?
Empower’s money management dashboard is free. If you want to take advantage of the company’s wealth management services, you’ll pay a fee.
Is Empower A Trustworthy Company?
Empower is a trustworthy company backed by praiseworthy reviews from thousands of Apple users.
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