Empower Personal Dashboard™ Reviews

I read a lot of online reviews of financial software offerings before I found Personal Capital. I love that I can get a big picture overview of my net worth, determine if I’m saving enough for my child’s education, if I’m saving enough for retirement, and seeing an aggregate of all my investments in one place. Also, like that it tracks my spending so I know how I well I’m keeping to a budget each month. In the past, I’ve tried tracking my finances using iBank, but it didn’t update automatically very well and was a lot of work to maintain. Personal Capital automatically updates everything, with the exception of my Capital One accounts, which apparently is an issue from Capital One’s end. A few drawbacks is not everything could be connected. For example, I couldn’t get my US Savings bonds and my NC 529 account to connect. Also, the connection to Zillow for estimating home values has been down for several months. I do like getting daily cash flow reports in my email. It allows me to easily confirm what I’ve spent on things before I’ve forgotten about them. Would definitely recommend EmpowerPersonalDashboard and the desktop app as well. I ended up opening some accounts with Personal Capital after meeting with the investment advisor. That still remains to be seen how well that does. Hoping my earnings are as good as they say they will be. Looking forward to getting more financial advice as my relational with their company continues.

Incredibly favorable dashboards and visualizations, better than any other for personally finance. I’m also a user of Mint (which is also good), and overall prefer Personal Capital. The investment allocation breakdowns are great, and intelligent recommendations are readily listed, though I wish that some better additional learning resources were immediately available within EmpowerPersonalDashboard , tied to those intelligent recommended actions.

One incredible service that EmpowerPersonalDashboard provides is free fiduciary services for users with over $100k in financial holdings. That has been a very nice surprise, and makes me feel even more confident that Personal Capital is in the user’s corner—I would have expected more predatory non-fiduciary financial advisor services, or a fee for service.

My only complaint is that Venmo constantly thinks that my account—which has been connected to the Personal Capital app, I believe through Plaid—is being hacked. I done have this issue with any of the other connected accounts I have with other financial institutions. It’s annoying, and paranoia inducing, but overall EmpowerPersonalDashboard offers an incredible amount of value.

After 23 years of using Quicken, yesterday I said goodbye. Instead, after thorough online research, I signed up for the FREE Personal Capital service, which I can’t rate high enough for the ease with which I could add a large number of banking, investment and credit card accounts to my Personal Capital account, and the incredibly user-friendly interface and seamless aggregation of all of our financial accounts and data. The state of the art security features built-in to Personal Capital were the clincher for me. Quicken’s subscription model for a product that is buggy and has not kept up with the times (no viable IOS product offering, an inferior Quicken for Mac product, etc.) is no longer acceptable to me. I absolutely love the way it is so easy to keep completely up to date with our finances through the Personal Capital program, and how there is instantaneous syncing of the data in the desktop and IOS Personal Capital apps. While I will lose some functionality that was offered by my Quicken for Windows product, that is more than made up by the many advantages offered by Personal Capital. I highly recommend Personal Capital.

I was one of the first to take a leap of faith with this new company when it started in September, 2011. I have NOT been disappointed with their product and services. If you want a daily picture of your net worth, it can't be beat. If you want a daily picture of how your investment portfolio is doing on a real time basis, it can't be beat. If you want to talk, chat, email, video chat or text your advisor and get a very quick response, it can't be beat. If you want current news and helpful investment, retirement, and current financial news, it can't be beat. I have used and been abused by many brokers in the past. My age, 72. These pros look after my financial assets and during these last 12 months, with volatility, I am very happy with my goals being met. Their platform and diversification program has kept my financial boat "afloat and on course" to meet my long term retirement objectives. The retirement planner is very effective and easy to use. GREAT TOOL! And during these times of uncertainty, their fees have been worth it. And the "app"........can't do better than this! Thank you Personal Capital!

I have tried numerous personal finance applications, and settled on Mint for the longest time; only because my financial institutions weren't available through those other apps. Then I heard about Personal Capital and thought I'd give it a try, and so far so great!

It syncs with my credit unions which is rare, and MUCH appreciated. I can link my investment accounts and get professional advice. After using other apps, I have to say that they seem more geared towards children. Mint is a little more robust, but Personal Capital seems to have it all. It's made for us grown-ups, and gives you all the tools necessary to manage your finances and help improve your financial well being.

Not to be understated, is the fact that they have apps for phones, tablets and desktop interfaces. Most other apps only offer phone apps which can be annoying to interface with unless you're just checking something quick while on the go. Mint does have all 3 as well, I just don't like their implementation of the interface as much and the tools they offer. Keep up the great work, and hopefully a year from now I'll still feel as good as I do now.

Overall there are some big positives to EmpowerPersonalDashboard - it connects to my credit union and to my credit union’s mortgage agency. It is the ONLY app that is able to do this. The charts are useful, even if it makes for an overwhelming interface. On the downside, the interface is incredibly busy and the navigation is confusing. Also, the downloading of transactions is incredibly unreliable and slow, and PC does not seem to update more than once per day. Mint is much more reliable from a download perspective and updates as many times as I want. It is also a much cleaner interface, and transactions are much more understandable in the Mint app. Also, there are little annoyances that prevent me from fully allocating my accounts. For example, PC doesn’t recognize my mortgage account as a mortgage, but I can’t reclassify it through EmpowerPersonalDashboard . Nor can I reclassify Betterment accounts as Savings - they always are Investments.

UPDATE 02/22 - The ap loses another star because it does not recognize most of the mortgage companies and auto loan companies that I do business with. Their syncing service pales next to Mint and I refuse to spend a lot of time updating stuff manually. If I’m going to have to do manual updates, I might as well use Mint, where my accounts all work. Very disappointing.

Personal Capital is a fantastic investment tracking and total Net Worth tracking application. It’s extremely easy to use and helps to even show you how prepared you are for retirement even taking inflation into account based in a goal retirement date. I’ve heard about EmpowerPersonalDashboard from multiple financial podcasts and tried it out. I immediately disconnected Mint from my accounts and deleted that app to use this. I still use EveryDollar for budgeting purposes though.

To make this a 5 star app/program, I’d love the ability to budget out specific categories and I’d like to do away with the “smart categorization” of transactions. They’re often wrong and take more time to correct the category than it would be to simply categorize each transaction as it came in. It would also be nice to be able to exclude certain accounts from cash flow / budget calculations (such as 401(k) investments, HSA purchases or contributions, etc…)

EveryDollar is still by far the best budgeting app I have ever used but personal capital is wonderful for everything else. I’m blown away by the features that are offered without a paid version.

EmpowerPersonalDashboard provides a view of all of your finances across multiple accounts and platforms, tracks your spending, and has graphs and tools to see how your investments compare to different indices. It is a great tool to use to see your investment allocations across multiple accounts although it does not include ETFs into your allocations which is a big bummer as ETFs are becoming increasingly popular and can make up a large percentage of portfolios. The best feature of EmpowerPersonalDashboard may be the retirement planner. It helps you to see potential outcomes associated with your spending, saving and investment habits and each scenario is customizable and savable so you can reference it later. My complaint is that the retirement planner could be even more customizable to allow more data points that could be adjusted for fluctuations over time rather than a single, non-fluctuating input. It would also be nice if there was an option to view potential outcomes based on a customizable return percentage rather than the current two options of mean and lowest 10%

Love EmpowerPersonalDashboard ! My main reason for writing this review is to provide suggestions to developers to make EmpowerPersonalDashboard even better than it already is. I will change my rating to 5 stars once I know that my comments have been acknowledged by the developer. love how you can categorize each transaction to keep track of your spending as well as set a monthly budget. However, currently there is no way to set a monthly budget for certain spending categories (e.g. you can set a total monthly budget of $2,500, but you can’t set separate category budgets for rent, restaurants, groceries, shopping, auto/transportation, etc.) It would also be helpful to be able to add budgets on a year-by-year basis in addition to month by month. For example, you want to set a travel budget of $6,000 per year but it wouldn’t make sense to just add $500 dollars to your monthly budget because you do most of your traveling at certain times of the year. Also, sometimes EmpowerPersonalDashboard misclassifies account credits as debits, not sure what’s going on there. Overall far superior app than most of the other ones out there!

I never write any reviews, but this time I feel I need to say thank you to the developers of EmpowerPersonalDashboard and for their online website. After years trying many other well-known budgeting and investing apps and services (YNAB, Intuit, etc) I found Personal Capital by chance and I was amazed by how much this solution offers for free. Connecting accounts (incl. 401k, HSA, mortgage, offshore accounts, etc) is super easy and the tool is really clever in categorizing your investment, income and expenses. The insights from the retirement and investment planner are really valuable. I am so impressed that I am considering opening an account and using their advisor services. As potential improvements, I would suggest the ability to further drill down into graphs and expense categories and better visualization and selection of income and expense categories and transactions. Overall amazing tool, potentially life changer for those interested in long-term financial planning. Highly recommended!

The key feature to app, the feature making it virtually indispensable, is it’s ability to aggregate financial data from multiple accounts. It is simply not possible to effectively manage your finances without seeing all your holdings - different banks, credit cards, and multiple brokerage firms - in one place. The truth is these data are already stored in the cloud; what EmpowerPersonalDashboard does is automatically merge the data and provided a complete breakdown of the composite holdings, fees and risk. Many brokerage firms do similar analysis but only if you pay for it or have large sums of money on deposit.

The interface is spectacular... but, there are a few features that could be improved. For example, the ability to set arbitrary targets for some holdings. Thus, if you are not interested in “alternative investments” you really need to ignore the advice provided. In short, EmpowerPersonalDashboard would be better if it helped you achieve your your goals nots its goals. Still it is free. You will probably get some call trying to sell you services - but the caller are not overly aggressive.

Bottom line. It’s a far better app than any brokerage firm provides today.

I used EmpowerPersonalDashboard for a long time and suddenly it did not work. I tried logging in several ways and it simply did not recognise my account. I got frustrated and left a negative review. I was told to contact their customer support. They tried to help but nothing worked so I just forgot about it for several months (almost a year I would say) and I recently got an email saying that my account was going to be deactivated if I don’t log in soon. So I tried it again (because why not) and I was actually able to log in. I’m not sure if it was a glitch before or what but my information is still intact and it’s services are still there for me to use.

I really love that EmpowerPersonalDashboard shows you how much money you spend and where you spend it. And it compares your spending to precious months which is useful. I usually try to see if I can spend less money this month than last month which is often a challenge. If you are looking for an app that you can track where your money goes then this is a decent app for that. Besides the weird glitch, it works very well for my purpose.

Has good tools for my finance tracking and planning but has issues with accounts regularly. There are “red” issues which require reauth which is fine. It just means where I keep my money is more on the paranoid side. But the “yellow” issues are a real pain as you can’t do anything to try and resolve them short of re-linking them which causes you to lose history. One of my credit cards is managed directly on the same page as my savings and checking through that institutions website. I have even seen the account temporarily pop up inside EmpowerPersonalDashboard and then disappear. PC refuses to fix it as they need a critical mass of requests before working on any particular issue. Had another card at a household company that was linked fine, then the issuer backing the credit sold their rights to another creditor. New website meant no more support from PC until reaching critical mass. Another household name institution has daily issues with balance recognition, and closing prices on the assets held in that account. I have worked application development in financial institutions for most of my career in commodity support. This kind of service would result in heads served on silver platters regularly... figuratively of course.

I chose a socially responsible portfolio approach which makes me feel better about this inheritance windfall I did not want to blow . I found other financial advisors are conflicted by their associatiions ( Insurance companies trying to sell me their annuities, double dipping brokers, my bank offering me retirement target mutual funds that had very high hiddens fees) loved Betterment interface too but the Personal Capital advisors are not just email accessible but will video conference , talk or email whenever you have questions. They have even helped my reallocate a Mish mash of securities into a more balanced portfolio to protect me from the market's volatility plus I got to divest of any gun, tobacco, fossil fuel, alcohol companies and yet show me the historical society that I can do just as well and feel good about myself chasing earnings. I am breathing freer with this transparent and organized new digital way of handling things. Give it a shot whether you only have $1000 in an account or property and retirement accounts to make last.

After consultation with a Financial Planner after I put together a budget on paper, I wanted a digital tool for managing all things financial in my life. After taking a few days to get familiar with navigating through all areas of EmpowerPersonalDashboard , Personal Capital it is exactly what I needed in my life, as it has become very financially diverse within the last two months.. The User Interface is excellent. It functions to provide easy to understand yet detailed data points that track and compare current and previous income, expenses..Investment assets are also easily managed within EmpowerPersonalDashboard . It accurately loads balances from several linked accounts (Credit Cards, banking, investment accounts, Robinhood) that are setup to require additional security authentication (passcodes). The graphs are well thought out and provide comparisons of spending and income from the previous month. This is an all around well developed financial app.

The positives of EmpowerPersonalDashboard are very strong: excellent visualization of all of life’s many banking, investment, loan, and mortgage accounts. My wife and I have a range of accounts from different institutions, and we’ve been able to connect them all easily. This functionality alone makes EmpowerPersonalDashboard A++ because it gives information and control over your personal finances.

The downside is notable but with some advance notice, it’s less pervasive. PCap monetizes by selling you financial advising services. They’ll call, email, etc to sell these to you. The defense to this is simple: after the first call from them, I blocked their number on my phone. Their marketing emails go straight to my junk folder. If you want their financial advice or assistance, I’m sure they’re high quality, but I don’t have a need for it at this point and so I block out the marketing/sales overtures.

Overall, a powerful tool for visualizing and tracking your personal financial health. Thanks, PCap!

Perfect for those with multiple accounts. I'm able to track everything in one place. I have my checking, savings, Roth IRA, betterment, E-Trade brokerage, employer Roth 401k, an old state pension account, and my credit cards and loans all in one easy to use interface. I love personal capital. I've been using it for 8 years now and with EmpowerPersonalDashboard I'm able to way track my net worth. I started at a measly $10k between all my accounts and I've been able to increase exponentially since the start. I'm well above my first 100k and I bought a home. Of course, the bull market for the last several years helped, but having one platform where you can track your progress and actually see the impact of compound interest definitely helped me stay on track with my goals. The dream is for my accounts to look a lot like the screenshots in EmpowerPersonalDashboard store. I'll keep you posted. 😉

I use EmpowerPersonalDashboard because I have multiple retirement accounts I needed a place to consolidate the information. I'm a do it yourself investor so I do not use the personal capital advisors service and can't comment on them. However I can't comment on the tools for consolidation of multiple accounts. There is a good amount of data without being over or under whelmed regarding amounts in each account, returns overtime in each account or aggregate and allocation asset classes. I would give this five stars however I have about 10 retirement accounts, and at any given time one or more have an issue and are not able to sync. Normally this is an issue with the retirement count itself and not personal capital, however the feedback from personal capital via email is extremely slow and dismissive of these issues. If the accounts cannot be links successfully, this is a problem with fundamentals of the application and the rest of the application becomes worthless.

I really, really love this tool. I have tried many other financial apps, but always stopped using them because I really need to be able to see the big picture. So, I just stuck to my custom spreadsheets — until personal capital. I love that I can look at cash flow and net worth, income and debt, all in one tool. My only feedback would be: the cash flow tool isn’t reliable, because my bank accounts regularly get logged out and need to be refreshed. It seems that there’s no way to get past banking data uploaded retroactively, and so I can’t actually use the tool reliably for my cash flow, even though it’s the best cash flow tool I’ve found yet. Would love to see that improved—maybe the ability to upload past data from CSV files? Also, re: savings goals: my big goal is to buy a house. Would love to see that as one of the options within the savings tracker!

I switched from Mint to Personal Capital about three years ago and I can not recommend it enough. There’s no advertisements for “pre-approved” credit cards they would help me “save even more.” The account linkages (automatic balance updates) work 98% of the time — with the rare exception being on of my wonkier student loans — which is a much higher success rate than I’ve experienced on other similar platforms. I’m not perfect about managing my budget, but being able to go in and edit the information (description and category tag) about each purchase from every account allows me to maintain a really good sense of where my money is going and the trends. I’ve linked my personal, small business, and daughter’s education accounts to Personal Capital and it’s been helpful to be able to see everything on one clean and intuitive dashboard — online (from anywhere), and on my iPad and iPhone.

I was a Quicken user for over 20 years, When they went to a subscription service, and their mobile capabilities weren’t great, I started looking for an alternative for my tracking my personal finances, all in one place. I didn’t use the Quicken bill pay option, so all I really was looking for was something to keep track of my bank accounts, mortgage, credit cards, 401(k) and other investments. I researched online and found Personal Capital to be highly rated.

For me, Personal Capital is exactly what I need. It brings in all of my bank accounts, investments, and even gives a Zestimate on my house and calculates the equity to build into my Net Worth. Took me a while to figure out how to get my Fidelity 401(k) to link, but through some Google searches, figured out that my company uses Fidelity Net Benefits site, so there you go.

You can easily download files into csv, which is a nice feature. It has the ability to add expense and income categories, but you can’t make additions or changes to the register. That being said, I didn’t really make additions to the register in Quicken anyway as it pulled data from my banks and financial institutions.

Mobile apps are great also. It works best on my iPad Pro, but still get info on my iPhone and regular iPad as well.

Super easy to set up, great visualization and data. Great solution.

I have been using Personal Capital for several months and I never had any problem until I updated to iPadOS. I loved the application and it’s features.
I already updated EmpowerPersonalDashboard to the latest version and because it kept crashing re-installed it a couple of times. iPadOS was also updated to the latest version.

Edited: After several uninstall/reinstall and removing my iPad from authorized devices in my account and disabling Touch ID, I got EmpowerPersonalDashboard working for a couple of weeks. Three days ago EmpowerPersonalDashboard started crashing again after an iPadOS update. EmpowerPersonalDashboard minimizes when loading the account data and you have to repeat the login process again and it keeps crashing. This time, all the reinstall process has not worked. Unsuccessfully tried to contact support through the web site since I cannot do it using EmpowerPersonalDashboard . I could not find how to submit a support request. The option must be buried some where not to be found. I think EmpowerPersonalDashboard is not optimized for iPadOS and need to be fixed.

EmpowerPersonalDashboard would be worthy of 5 stars if only it would accommodate splitting transactions to multiple categories. Think about it, when an investment holding is sold multiple things should be happening. Clear the original cost of the investment, record gain or loss on the sale, and record fees associated with the transaction. Since Personal Capital is an investment based app, you’d think this would be common sense. Also, mortgage payments involve payment of principal, interest, and escrow related expenses. A simple category of “mortgage pymt” doesn’t provide a good picture of what is truly happening. Please consider adding this feature soon!

Updated: You may be losing me to Mint. Downloaded their app today, and am giving it a go. So far I’m impressed with the ease of setup and ability to edit and SPLIT transactions. To be honest your app is nothing but a place to see all of your balances.....you can’t do anything with it. Mint allows for transaction entry (including splits), bill pay and more. Plus you can see all your balances in one place.

I’ve tried several personal finance, investing, and budgeting apps. While other choices might be superior on one aspect (ie Mint for budgeting), Personal Capital is far and away the best if you want to rely on one app for all aspects of your finances. Starting with your net worth summary, drill down on your investments, get alerts to high fees or concentrated positions, and use very intuitive budget tools to monitor where the money is going. Switch to the laptop to get retirement projections, compare performance against benchmarks. They offer paid services like portfolio management but they don’t constantly solicit you like Mint and other apps hit you with credit card offers. I know it’s tough to switch if you’ve invested a lot of time with a different app, but you won’t be disappointed if you give PC a try.

Overall I am pleased with Personal Capital, and there are many powerful and useful features. But the utility of these features (not just on EmpowerPersonalDashboard , but also on the full website) is diminished by the inability of Personal Capital to fully interface and access my accounts in TIAA CREF. It had been working fine until I (along with all of my fellow employees) opened a self-directed brokerage account (SDBA) with my retirement account because my employer “streamlined” the allocation options in our 403b and 401a accounts. Now, PC lists the total $ amount but does not “see” the allocations or tickers any of the mutual funds that are in the SDBA, even though TIAA website lists all of them and tracks their allocations for me (and none of them are obscure or little-known mutual funds by any means). That has been frustrating. I sure hope that PC will fix this problem soon, otherwise I cannot even monitor about 20% of my entire portfolio and all of the retirement calculators and allocation determinations are moot.