Empower, Prudential Retirement Reviews

This is the second time I have tried to access my account from EmpowerPrudentialRetirement . Impossible. When I called I was told to use laptop..duh....if I had a laptop I would. Which brings me to the question, why do you have an app? And then when speaking to a representative I asked to receive paper statements. Can’t do that because of Covid-19. Funny, I seem to receive bills just fine. Also when calling asked first if I would participate in a survey at the end of my call...you betcha! And of course at the end of the call was immediately disconnected. Basically useless....tempted to rollover this 401k. This one simple transaction took over an hour to complete.

Update: thank you for your computer generated response. No...I will not waste another minute explaining how I can’t log in. I-Phone..Safari browser. I’m sure you know the problem.....read all the other reviews. Your App should clearly display phone numbers for HELP.

I get the same message others complain about here,”you can’t access your account with EmpowerPrudentialRetirement right now”. The way it’s phrased used to make me think this was a temporary issue, but I’ve been trying for a month with no success. It just directs me to the website, and Prudential doesn’t seem to have any online support (no “contact us” forms or email addresses).

In general, I always have difficulty accessing my Prudential data in apps or services. It is where I have the majority of my assets and it’s extremely frustrating not being able to see my balances in my financial software (so my net worth ends up being the sum of all my debt). It seems like the only place I can review Prudential data is on their antiquated website or in Mint, which I’m not a big fan of.

After years of frustration I think it’s time to move my retirement accounts to a company that provides modern ways to access and review my account information.

Okay, so it seems to be a recurring issue with Prudential and its “technical support” and IT Department. I read ICOZIP review on here and found they had similar issue in August of this year. It’s now September and I was hoping for a better experience. I called the phone number provided by the rep here in the review response and unfortunately EmpowerPrudentialRetirement still USELESS!!! Why is this stupid, useless app still on EmpowerPrudentialRetirement Store if all it basically doing is working as a glorified Safari shortcut???? Tech support insisted it was a password issue and I said NO I can log into the browser but I PREFER SECURITY through EmpowerPrudentialRetirement by using fingerprint log in INSTEAD of password entering. She then said “This is an IT Dept issue” and basically restated I change my password. What a fool! PRUDENTIAL, FIX THE ISSUE AT HAND OR REMOVE YOUR USELESS IPHONE APP!!! Your app is a joke!!!

Overall, solid nice app / web site to use. Clear, logical, and efficient. Room for improvement for selecting other funds. Kinda limiting on selection of investment options. It would be nice to easily see all the fund expenses and fees also.
From a local perspective, my employer “use” to have a Prudential representative personally appear on site and review face to face your investment options in a conference room. Now, it’s all virtual which is a real disconnect and no real connection. COVID is now the excuse or reason why. I don’t think we will ever go back to a massless in person society thanks to COVID and a fear based drum beat constant by our Media.

This has been a problem for me since the redesign a few months ago. I have deleted it and reloaded the latest version and no change. I try to login and get a screen that says I must login to the website to update my profile and I will be prompted. I login to the website on my computer - no prompts. I try to login to the page EmpowerPrudentialRetirement gives me - doesn’t work. A few months ago I called Prudential support and their reply was EmpowerPrudentialRetirement doesn’t work. I thought maybe this was fixed with the new version. I see from the comments I am not the only person experiencing this. Could someone get their act together to figure out the issue here? I also tried updating stuff on my profile on the web and saving it but that didn’t do it either. Everything was correct and nothing to change.

EmpowerPrudentialRetirement has been nothing but problems since I got it. Every time I go to log in I get the exact same error message about my account not being available at this time and to log in through the site. I then log into the site and my retirement info (annuity) will never show up. It’s just a constant loading screen on any device I attempt to log in through. It’s very difficult to see if my employers have been making the contributions that are owed to me when I cannot even begin to see the balance in my account. I really hope they fix these issues because unfortunately I do not have a choice in who my money is invested through, I can say that if I did it would most certainly not be prudential when such a large company cannot seem to get things straightened out.

I’d been using the browser version for years and just noticed that they have a mobile app. EmpowerPrudentialRetirement is clean and well organized. Many of the main features that I use it for (performance, investment types, etc) are all available. Looks like you recently overhauled EmpowerPrudentialRetirement and I am going to use EmpowerPrudentialRetirement much more. Thanks for helping me with my retirement goals and I hope more people find it useful too!

I enjoy the convenience of using EmpowerPrudentialRetirement , however there should be more options within it ; such as alerts better graphics and interfacing with the account holder allowing real-time notifications to enhance your user experience. Sometimes the content makes me feel out of the loop because updates with performance information has been delayed for several days at a time on various occasions which has caused me to not enjoy EmpowerPrudentialRetirement as I end up loosing more money than I ordinarily would , since there are options for transfers to less volatile fund selections , this defeats my purpose of using it in the first place.

I keep getting a pop up when I try to login that kicks me back to the website to help me “upgrade” my experience. The website is not mobile capable and has no clear directions for how to “upgrade” to EmpowerPrudentialRetirement . it feels super sketchy that I can’t just access EmpowerPrudentialRetirement directly to see my own money and reduces my confidence that Prudential is managing my money responsibly. it’s bad enough that I can’t seem to do anything with the website but look at my account and it telling me that I’m not saving enough for retirement while at the same time not telling me how to put more in. ridiculously bad for a financial services company although I’m not surprised their products are inaccessible to millennials because all they do is diss us in their ads anyway.

If this rating system had a zero instead of one star as the minimum I would be giving you a zero! Against my better judgment I decided to load the latest version and it didn’t work any different than the previous ones that have been offered up in the last three or four months! I still can’t login !!!! I even deleted EmpowerPrudentialRetirement and reloaded it and I still can’t login! Obviously you people can’t write a program either because none of them work and the old one used to work.
I will be calling your technical assistance line tomorrow. I’m sure I will get the same lame excuses that you always give. Personally I’m sick of your excuses and your extended delays in resolving this problem.

Just as the reviewer immediately above me noted, EmpowerPrudentialRetirement persistently says you cannot access your account at this time and redirects me to the website. I’ve tried uninstalling and reinstalling but to no avail.
I do not understand how the developer can post updates of newly improved features when I can’t open my account up at all. I recently asked a Prudential representative about EmpowerPrudentialRetirement during a phone call and was told the same thing “...don’t know why EmpowerPrudentialRetirement doesn’t work”. EmpowerPrudentialRetirement needs to be taken down altogether until it is repaired. I share the sentiments of the reviewer above - in this day and age it’s simply unacceptable not to be able to access a major portion of one’s retirement account.

My company recently transferred management of our 401(k) and pension plans to Prudential from Wells Fargo. It’s been a nightmare. The website is very clunky to begin with. A bigger issue is that for some unexplained reason, my funds from the two categories of 401(k) and pension into four categories - my contributions, employer match, pension, and QNEC(?). The problem is that if you want to make a transfer, you can only do one category at a time. And once you make a transfer in one category, all other categories are locked until the first transfer is processed - at least a day. It’s a totally unnecessary, time-wasting, inconvenient, and costly feature of the website.

For a major financial institution to offer such a junky, non-useful app they should be thrown in jail for offering such an app with so many bugs! You can’t even log into it. It constantly redirects you to their website even after all the upgrades known to man! EmpowerPrudentialRetirement doesn’t even deserve 1 star! My T. Rowe Price app works, Robinhood Stock Trade App works, hell even Acorns works, and I didn’t even have to call their Tech Support Desk! Prudential your Tech Team needs to get their “Pieces of Rocks” together and fix this junk! Who with any technical ability that manages the technical division of Prudential could even consider that EmpowerPrudentialRetirement was ready to be offered to their clients???? Oh I know the ones that get million dollars bonuses TO DO NOTHING!!!

I did not find EmpowerPrudentialRetirement very useful when it first came out. I recently revisited it and was pleasantly surprised functionality added. First, Face ID was added, which made it much faster to access than a web browser. When it first came out all you could do was review your balance. Now you can change your contribution percentage, review and make changes to your investments and read articles. Now a useful app!

Is there any plan to introduce Cryptocurrency funds like what others have done? I would really like to put 15-20% of my 401k spread out amongst assets of my choosing.

If not how can I go about transferring my funds to another entity where I can? I won’t name any names, I do not want to take a loan to do so. I have a crypto portfolio already. I do not want as much fiat as I have and want to diversify in the worlds emerging technologies.

This is what an app should be. It’s the easiest to access, easiest to navigate, most thorough financial tool I’ve used. Subconsciously, if I know a bank app is a pain to use, I stay away more than I should. This one is the opposite. I access it whenever I want because I know I won’t end up frustrated.

It works. You can see your overall performance and see the funds you are in. You can also see what the contributions are. But that is it. Should be so much more. EmpowerPrudentialRetirement would be good if it was 10 years ago but it is 2019. I want to dig in further. How are each of my funds doing individually? I want to do comparisons. Basically your company uses Prudential for your 401k so you are stuck and therefor there is no motivation for Prudential to compete for your business so that is why this is app is super basic. BTW their website is meh as well.

EmpowerPrudentialRetirement use to work great. I have no idea what happened. Can’t log in anymore. I tried deleting EmpowerPrudentialRetirement and reinstalling it. Restarted my phone. I can log in through the website, but it’s a pain and it takes time.
Prudential is an old school financial company that has never really kept up with the times. If it wasn’t such a giant it would have been taken over years ago.
I have several other retirement accounts that blow this one away. This was top of the line 15 years ago..........

Attempted to see my quarterly account statements today, seems simple enough right?

It turns out there is no way to do this through EmpowerPrudentialRetirement , no problem though, I can just go to their website using my phone.

Get to the website and immediately select “view/print statements and documents”.

“Well that was easy.” I thought

Wrong, on the webpage for viewing documents you get a drop down with a list of your quarterly statements. You can select anyone of them but there is no way to actually view or print the statement you have selected. Ended up having to use the custom date range feature to generate quarterly statements because the prudential app and website both lack this very basic functionality.

I have not been able to login for a week now and still can not get in on EmpowerPrudentialRetirement . Can only access from the website. Many people are having the same problem. When it worked EmpowerPrudentialRetirement was good but, now it is useless until the problem is fixed.
The problem was fixed two days later and is now working fine. Thanks

EmpowerPrudentialRetirement is fine for looking at your balances, but the only change you can make to the contribution amount. What would be useful to me Is the ability to change funds, change allocation amounts, etc.. I would also like to have access to the fund descriptions and performance history. Links to current financial market news would also be interesting.

Since the new update months ago I have not been able to use EmpowerPrudentialRetirement . I have the same issue as some other people here where I need to update my settings to use EmpowerPrudentialRetirement . When I try to do that it says my account cannot use EmpowerPrudentialRetirement at this time. I am tired of seeing the same response from the developers to this issue too. EmpowerPrudentialRetirement used to work for me, now it doesn’t. You are one of the largest financial institutions and I work for a state government so thousands of people can’t use EmpowerPrudentialRetirement anymore either. It’s 2019 stop giving generic answers and fix it.

I would like to see more information added to the investment options. Once you click the investments tab and the investments are showing, add a feature that lets you see how many shares you have in each investment category and also how much each share costs. That would be really useful. It’s very time consuming logging on to the computer to see this info. Adding it to EmpowerPrudentialRetirement would be very useful. Thanks. Hope to see that upgrade soon!

Does not show all my accounts like the prudential website does. It says “ You have plan(s) not currently supported by our app. Please log into to view your full account.”
I hope they change this so I can see everything.

EmpowerPrudentialRetirement is fine for checking a balance, but if you try to look at anything else, the screen with go black every few seconds. Also, under performance it just shows what you’re invested in. There are no graphs, no way to see how many shares, etc. It doesn’t seem that the developers are working too hard to fix this as people have been having this issue for months.
iPhone X.