by John Wedding
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Track your finances, and get insights on your financial outlook, with Empower … Having a little bit of money is nice, but it's not all fun and games. The more complicated your financial picture, the more involved it is to track your finances.
Consider having the following:
- Several savings and checking accounts, some for personal transactions and some for business transactions
- Several credit cards, again some for personal and some for business
- Taxable and tax-advantaged mutual funds
- Employee-sponsored retirement account
- Brokerage accounts
- Real estate assets, and mortgages against them
- Peer-to-peer lending accounts
- And on and on …
If you have aton of money, then you can pay someone to track and manage all of it for you. But for that in-between amount of money, having a software tool to suck in everything is nice.
It's even better if it's free.
Track your finances and net worth with Empower's free online tool
I created an account with Empower on the recommendation of a number of bloggers, and I'm glad I did.
Signing up is completely straightforward, and linking accounts is relatively pain-free. I fully appreciate all of the pain that the software developers go through to make sure that their service works with the tens of thousands of individual financial sites that customers use. Merely thinking of all the different kinds ofauthentication that they have to deal with gives me a headache. Empower takes that headache away.
They even managed to get their service to work with my credit union. It took a bit of time for them to get it done, but they did, and they've kept it working even though our credit union made wholesale changes to its website in the meantime.
What Empower does for me
Here's what Empower does for me, for free:
- Empower tracks all of my accounts in one place.I don't think I've missed any, and I have all of the account types listed above! It pulls in everything I need from mytwenty-three linked accounts — including my local credit union! (Plus,it pulls my TSP holdings, which I'll talk about in more detail later.) I especially like the styling of the category dropdowns — it shows a 90-day “sparkline” with the change in the overall balance of each category. You can see this in the picture below (I cut off the dollar amounts in the right part of the picture but this should give you an idea):
- Empower gives me a detailed look at each asset class.If I click on, say, the Cash label, seen in the picture, I'll get a summary of all of the cash holdings (checking accounts, savings accounts, PayPal, cash holdings in brokerage accounts, etc.) along with a time-series graph of the total that I can adjust.
- Empower dives into the transactions for each account.If I click on my checking account, I'll get all of the transactions for that account, along with the same kind of graph. If I click on my mortgage account, it shows me my required payment and the extra principal reduction (we round our mortgage payment up to the next $100). In other words, there's a ton of information tailored to the kind of account.
- Empower gives consolidated net worth and transaction reports.This lets me see the totals in one place, and all of the ins and outs in one place.
- Empower breaks down investment holdings by type from the funds.Cash, domestic stocks, international stocks, bonds, and more … Empower instantly breaks it down into percentages and pulls it into a cake chart (like a pie chart but rectangular — I just made that term up). If I click on one color of the cake chart, it shows me the accounts and funds that contributed to that part of the holdings. Really slick!
- Empower helps plan and predict for retirement age.Adjust some values for retirement age, desired burn rate per month, social security, etc., and Empower will tell you how you're doing, and what you can do to improve. (This is where you'll find where Empower makes its money, which is managing your portfolio for a reasonable fee. And they have over $1.2 trillion — trillion with a T — in assets under management, so there you go!) But there's still a whole lot of insight just from the free tool that you can get.
- Oh … and Empower has a great smartphone app, too!The app for Android is slick, clear, and colorful. If I want to check what's happening on the go, it's all in there.
Bonus for federal employees: Empower tracks the TSP!
I just about squealed with delight when I found this out. Empower tracks federal Thrift Savings Plan balances and transactions!
Tracking TSP balances and transactions in other ways is largely a manual process. In Quicken, for example, if I want to track by fund, then I need to make up fictitious ticker symbols, download the fund price history data and hack into the CSV file, import it into Quicken, and then manually enter the transactions with share amounts and dollar amounts. It's painful.
I'm hoping that this will change at some point for other software, but for now, I'm glad that Empower brings in all in. I don't know how they sweet-talked the government into doing this (and, frankly, I don't care how!) but it rocks!
Empower gives you all of this for free
You won't be bombarded with ads. They have one product (managing your funds for you) and buying their services is not required at all to use Empower. Using the tool I've described in this article won't cost you a dime. Just click here and give it a try and put my assessment to the test!
