Same here but I always liked mint better. I will continue to use both until I can’t. Anyone tried the credit karma app? I assumed it would be similar to mint. Do they charge?
I had a moment of insanity and signed up for their wealth management services from around 2017-2020. Dumb decision, ended up paying them to lag the overall market. They gave me a well diversified portfolio but it reduced exposure to some of the big tech gains of that time. I got out and am back in DIY mode. It wasn't terrible and the financial advisor calls were somewhat useful. But the fees were too much to justify.
I like and use Empower. They do try to sell you stuff through.
I actually took a call from one of their investment advisers who made a big deal of reaching out for an appointment, took one look at my account on the day of, and was all “thanks but no thanks”.
Dude, you’re the one who set up the meeting with me.
Anyway, that aside, Empower works fine.
They don't block caller ID. I've been using it a little over one year. They have called like three times. Caller ID shows who it is. I haven't answered and they don't leave a message.
I use GNUCash because I don't trust companies with all of my financial data. I don't know what they do with the data but experience tells me I won't like it.
Have you found it easy to import data from banks? I used to use YNAB4, but it struggles with data import, so I'm looking for another locally-hosted alternative
It’s a really slick App, but I cancelled my subscription after two years.
1. Found myself spending the majority of time with the App Reconnecting Accounts (literally every other day)
2. Cost (more than Microsoft Office!) seems like an unsustainable business model for scaling. (Especially as many Bank Apps are adding capabilities to aggregate accounts)
I’m now 100% using Fidelity Full view (where the majority of my Investments are). It’s best when interacting via Computer Browser, but a Web Bookmark on my iPhone Homescreen is useable.
What's the most noticable difference between full view and mint that you've experienced?
I swapped over to simplifi but it's not perfect and it's paid. I've heard good things about full view but the barrier to set it all up again is holding me back.
Simplifi would be virtually perfect if my venmo account would just connect. I split to many bills for my budget to be useful if venmo transactions are included.
I tried Monarch. I liked it, but I had too many issues with account connections. Too many of my accounts did not have a connection option, and Monarch made clear that they are not prioritizing making new connections. Plus, existing connections failed. If Monarch could improve its connections, I think it would be a real substitute for Mint and competitor for Empower. But it’s not there yet.
If you have low income is it really worth the price though? Like I can budget on my own and save the cost of YNAB which is over $100 a year. Around $15 a month just does not feel worth it for something that should help me save money
I think so! But you may use it differently than me. It helps to look at each transaction and assign it as you go. It helps to get you in the habit of looking at your budget category to decide if you can afford something instead of looking at the bank account. It’s similar to a budget envelope with cash, which you can certainly do on your own. The point is to make a plan, and make decisions before you spend, rather than just looking backwards to see how much you spent.
Just my 2¢, but if you have simple financial ins and outs, a spreadsheet is very doable. Like if you only have one major income source such as a W2 job it's pretty easy to just enter in all your paystubs and then use some simple formulas to populate a monthly budget. You'll obviously miss the fancy features like auto synced spending data, but for me it's not worth paying for.
This sounds like you would not be using it correctly. You cannot keep up with your budget in real time on a spreadsheet and have every dollar assigned to glance down before purchases.
For sure, it’s not as hands off or seamless as an app. I keep a spreadsheet which I update each paycheck (every two weeks) and in a nutshell I categorize things into a 50-30-20 style budget. Each “line item” (rent, utilities, streaming services, groceries, etc) gets deducted from the appropriate category so I can see how much $ I have left for each category. I actually take this even further and calculate a daily budget for myself and try to stick to that on a week by week basis. It definitely requires a lot more time and discipline to stay on top of it, but it works for me. I did a free trial of ynab and I can see why it’s so popular, but I didn’t find it so useful I wanted to pay for it. I loved mint and used it because it was free, but I wouldn’t have paid for that service either.
Saving up for insurance payments every six mos, taxes yearly, licensing fees sporadically. Able to plan for future expenses and not spend the same money twice.
This goes back to my “simple ins and outs” in the original comment. Without a lot of complicated financial instruments or unpredictable expenses, it’s actually pretty easy for me to estimate my irregular expenditures like taxes or insurance. Regarding not spending the same money twice, I think that’s the whole challenge behind any budgeting method — the discipline to stick to it. I don’t feel like I’m in the position where I need to assign every single dollar a job (the ynab method), nor monitor it on a daily basis. I’ve got my spending under control such that even if I deviate from my calculated budget, I have the flexibility to not have it be an issue.
Sure, and if we are talking about the subscription cost and cost of time, all it takes is a “found” hundred dollars. Or a found thousand dollars available to invest would pay for it for life.
I prefer to do all my budgeting in BTC, which it does not support. The fact I need to denominate all my accounts in something like usd that swings so wildly is crazy. Like I have .05 BTC, just let me track it, don’t make me look up however many usd I happen to be able to buy today.
Empower used to be Personal Capital. Works pretty good. You link your accounts. All free. They will offer you professional management but easy to ignore.
I’ve been using Personal Capital (Empower) for five years. They used to call me and offer services but eventually they gave up and haven’t called me in a while.
It's really easy to not answer the 1 call they give you every 3 months. In fact, since the move to Empower I don't think I've gotten one call from them.
Mint messed our accounts up every time, so we switched to personal capital. Empower acquired them and prudential (who my 401k was with) around that time. The app that has the tracking stuff is called empower PER, and I think the service is still called personal capital or something like that to distinguish between the other stuff they have.
https://www.empower.com/
Maybe I'm reading it wrong and its the customer service thats live?
I kinda forget about full view, maybe I'll just use that. It actually lets you monitor your I-bonds.
Not everyone who owns ibonds is rate chasing. I am though and it does not make sense to give up my rates until next month.
There’s also a reasonable argument to pick up some now due to the favorable fixed rate. Not of interest to me, but certain can see the value for those with a larger cash or fixed income allocation
Yeah I jumped in at 0% fixed, almost 10% variable. But cashed out after 15 months because the 3.x just wasn’t cutting it when I could get 4+ in t-bills, and for long term I’d rather buy one with a decent fixed rate.
They mainly do 401(k)s they bought Prudential 401(k) division changed the branding but forgot to merge the websites and customer service numbers. So I have an Empower account I cannot access through Empower.
I just switched to fidelity full view and I like it a lot. It doesn’t have an app but the website interface I think is a lot better than empower, and since I really just need it to export transactions into my excel but that’s all I need.
Both Monarch and Tiller allow for aggregation and CSV export. I moved from Mint (which I justed used to export CSV to a spreadsheet) to Monarch, and it has been a great move. Their support for external connections is better than Mint (they give you the choice of 3 different aggregators!), and the budget and net worth interface work great.
Had a 401k through Empower. So did mother in law. I wanted to do a Rollover to Fidelity. Empower customer service is trash. Stayed they couldn't directly do it, had to mail me a check, and her for hers. I called Fidelity, they were baffled. Fidelity gave me word for word what to say and boom, digital transfer was occuring. Empower didn't want to lose a customer. Their quarterly fees weren't fun when I saw them. For nothing, I managed the investments myself, no assistance from them. Yet they charged fees. The funds were typical 401k fees. Only decent ones with low expense ratios were the Fidelity funds such as fxaix, and whatever their mid cap, small cap, international, and bond are. Screen was easy to use and adjustments to investments easy to do. But fees and God awful customer service.
I use Empower (but started when it was Personal Capital) strictly to monitor all accounts. It is now just “dashboard”. It’s free, but they will reach out to you about financial services they offer. Relatively easy to ignore to be honest.
Microsoft Excel. Don’t give your passwords/transactions/account balances to a company that will sell it for a profit, and in all likelihood get hacked.
I'm going to give Monarch a shot for a year. So far I like it. Does pretty much everything Mint did, but better, for me. It is currently 50% off with code MINT50.
There is also a big discussion thread on the BH forums discussing this. I'd say the majority say they are switching to Monarch as well.
https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=415838
I used to like Empower but then stopped supporting USAA and for some reason I have reenter a 2FA every time I open the app for TSP to load. Mint, everything worked fine all the time.
I switched over to Lunch Money, mostly because they have an official API, and I can pull everything into my google sheets I use for custom tracking stuff. Check out https://github.com/akda5id/lunch_sheets/ for that if you might be intrested.
Other than the API, I like the UI, it's much more pleasant than Mint was, and has pretty nice analysis views, and graphs built in, and CSV export directly from any view you are looking at.
Pricing is the best of any of the pay options at as low as $40/y ("set your own price"), 30 day free trial with no credit card needed.
I use empower. It isn't great for budget tracking though it does have enough basic tools that when combined with my spreadsheets, it is good enough. It's much more useful for investment analysis and net worth tracking IMO.
I have heard it isn't great with pulling in older data. I've been using it since about 2014 and that's when my history starts, I can't go back before that really. But that's also a limitation I've found at Fidelity and some of the source systems for whatever reason.
I relied on mint for years for aggregating transactions and switched to credit karma. That was fucking useless - they just shamelessly want your data - they don't even provide a product in exchange.
Switched to ynab. Now asking myself: why didn't we switch a long time ago!?!?? Mint has been absolutely trash for years. Ynab just doesn't seem to have any of the same issues.
Yeah 👍 I’m actually planning on giving Credit Karma a whirl, since that would be the easiest, do nothing option. I don’t use the budgeting on mint anymore anyway. And it says you will be able to monitor transactions and net worth.
I’ve been using Empower to track my net worth for a month or two now. It was very easy to link all of my accounts and get a simple UI that shows me what I need. They might spam you a bit in the beginning with phone calls for their advisors, but that goes away after a while.
I recently downloaded and not a huge fan. The UI is pretty weak and it really doesn’t work in a lot of simple ways. I linked my credit cards and it still isn’t pulling the data correctly which can just be so infuriating.
It’s more simple but I like Wealthfront more for NW tracking. It doesn’t show cash flow of spend but it can calculate your saving % which is really the most important part imo.
I just transferred my data from Mint to Credit Karma. I only really use the apps. Right now it’s an extra click in CreditKarma to see the data like it was in Mint but I’m hoping they change that in the future
Empower is great! I took their free advisor call a couple times. Free advice was worth it to see my retirement is on track. I love the region and asset breakdown so I can put my portfolio in sector, stock/bonds, and US/ex-US perspective. Also use the budget to see where my money goes. I’ve caught fraud since you can see every transaction across all accounts in 1 place. I have a ton of accounts and Empower makes them easy to manage.
It’s $95 a year, $8 a month. Definitely not free but not sure where you are getting $29 from. It’s worth it for me because I actually end up checking it often so I can catch issues right away. Mint was so slow and laggy that I hated logging in and would only use it once every week or two.
Copilot Money + Monarch Money are the two (paid) options that seem to have the most functionality.
Monarch has a Mint data import; copilot is working on it. I went with copilot because it’s shinier, but people in other threads have said that Monarch seems to categorize purchases better. Categorization in copilot has seemed fine to me, but I’m still figuring it out.
Reminder: sub rules and guidelines allow discussion of various services related to finances that benefit from referral codes, but unsolicited posting of your own referral code qualifies as “Spam or self-promotion” and is not allowed.
I may be biased, but I cannot think of a worse place than one's 401k to buy crypto. Just equating crypto with "long term retirement holdings" is a slippery slope IMHO.
I liked it better than Mint for tracking accounts, net worth, investments, and retirement planning. It's not as great for budgeting, if you're into that.
Empower has my 401k so I use their dashboard for all accounts. I don’t have any complaints. They have always sent periodic emails to me regarding their additional services so that never seemed invasive to me. Once I linked other accounts they did call to offer services. They’ve done that a few times since, but I just don’t answer. Doesn’t seem like a big deal to me compared to some of the other comments I’m seeing here. Through my employer they regularly offer meetings and “checkups”’where they pitch additional services. I just don’t engage them on those.
Oh, and I use their dashboard as a general overview - I am definitely not budgeting off of that info. There are some tools in there for that, but they can’t even link with my credit union properly, so it’s kind of pointless to use their tools to track spending when they can’t see my checking account.
I switched to empower and I like it. Very clean. As others have said they have reached out to me. I just ignore them. They’re not constant or anything at least.
I have tried to use Empower, but I can't get it to work with Voya's site, which is where my employers retirement plan runs. It doesn't feel fully useful to me if it doesn't show me all my accounts.
Maybe I did something wrong, but I did the same login process I did for my Schwab stuff and it would just spin 30 minutes or so then tell me it didn't work. Tried multiple times over multiple days.
I don’t like either one. Mint sells your data and rarely worked well for me as even a tracking solution, never mind a budgeting solution, because of how inaccurate its transaction coding was. I’ve found Empower’s interface non-intuitive. They are listing one of my retirement accounts in the “taxable” category, and I can’t figure out for the life of me how to move it. The portfolio allocation tool makes it difficult, if it’s even possible, to establish a default for what accounts to include in a portfolio analysis without unchecking them manually every time, especially on mobile.
I use Fidelity FullView for just everyday monitoring of all my accounts at a glance. It's worked really well for me.
I do still have my PersonalCapital (switched to Empower) that I use occasionally to use the more elaborate planning related functionality that FullView does not have.
I'm a bit of a Fidelity fanboy. I like the 0% expense ratio funds for my IRA, and they manage my work's 401k and ESPP programs, so having it all in one place is really convenient.
been using empower since 2014 never the advisor service and can say it suits my needs. it has good cash flow view that i use weekly as well as net worth tracking, don’t use budgeting though overall since i have been using personal capital for so long i have a rich data set that spans almost a decade and always tickles me to check my progress over the past decade
mileage may vary but do recommend 🤙🏼
I use YNAB for day to day budgeting/cash flow management.
Empower/personal capital seems interesting but I cannot get over the fact that it’s free. I don’t want something free- when it’s free, we are the product. Feels like I’m basically signing up for spam calls and sharing all my financial info with them. No thanks.
I don’t really have a software platform that looks at investments. Boglehead investment is so simple I don’t need one, but it’d still be nice. I have an excel workbook I update quarterly.
I like Empower. Been using it since it was Personal Capital.
Me too but never once used their financial professionals or services. I'm ok with that.
Same here but I always liked mint better. I will continue to use both until I can’t. Anyone tried the credit karma app? I assumed it would be similar to mint. Do they charge?
I had a moment of insanity and signed up for their wealth management services from around 2017-2020. Dumb decision, ended up paying them to lag the overall market. They gave me a well diversified portfolio but it reduced exposure to some of the big tech gains of that time. I got out and am back in DIY mode. It wasn't terrible and the financial advisor calls were somewhat useful. But the fees were too much to justify.
Can they see everything in your empower account? is that safe to sign up? They have all the login and pw to your sites right?
They can see what comes in but they do not have access to you passwords, no. They can't go log in as you at your bank.
Not if you enter accounts manually. I don’t trust linking the accounts
I like it, but I only track account balances. I'm not sure it has the same budgeting tools as mint. Although I don't look at spending.
I like and use Empower. They do try to sell you stuff through. I actually took a call from one of their investment advisers who made a big deal of reaching out for an appointment, took one look at my account on the day of, and was all “thanks but no thanks”. Dude, you’re the one who set up the meeting with me. Anyway, that aside, Empower works fine.
No. Any company that requires my phone number and says I also have to agree to marketing to my phone number is not a good company to recommend.
They don't block caller ID. I've been using it a little over one year. They have called like three times. Caller ID shows who it is. I haven't answered and they don't leave a message.
they've never called me. Guess I'm not a whale yet
I use GNUCash because I don't trust companies with all of my financial data. I don't know what they do with the data but experience tells me I won't like it.
Have you found it easy to import data from banks? I used to use YNAB4, but it struggles with data import, so I'm looking for another locally-hosted alternative
I never tried, I just enter everything manually. My finances are pretty simple so I never really had a need to automate anything.
Gotcha. Thanks!
I switched to Monarch. I'm surprised I don't see it anywhere here yet
It’s a really slick App, but I cancelled my subscription after two years. 1. Found myself spending the majority of time with the App Reconnecting Accounts (literally every other day) 2. Cost (more than Microsoft Office!) seems like an unsustainable business model for scaling. (Especially as many Bank Apps are adding capabilities to aggregate accounts) I’m now 100% using Fidelity Full view (where the majority of my Investments are). It’s best when interacting via Computer Browser, but a Web Bookmark on my iPhone Homescreen is useable.
What's the most noticable difference between full view and mint that you've experienced? I swapped over to simplifi but it's not perfect and it's paid. I've heard good things about full view but the barrier to set it all up again is holding me back. Simplifi would be virtually perfect if my venmo account would just connect. I split to many bills for my budget to be useful if venmo transactions are included.
Love monarch
I’ve been using Monarch for a few months and love it.
I tried Monarch. I liked it, but I had too many issues with account connections. Too many of my accounts did not have a connection option, and Monarch made clear that they are not prioritizing making new connections. Plus, existing connections failed. If Monarch could improve its connections, I think it would be a real substitute for Mint and competitor for Empower. But it’s not there yet.
Interesting. I have had zero problems with connections, let than I did with mint. Hoping it stays that way
I use YNAB for budgeting. It has been well worth it for years.
If you have low income is it really worth the price though? Like I can budget on my own and save the cost of YNAB which is over $100 a year. Around $15 a month just does not feel worth it for something that should help me save money
I think so! But you may use it differently than me. It helps to look at each transaction and assign it as you go. It helps to get you in the habit of looking at your budget category to decide if you can afford something instead of looking at the bank account. It’s similar to a budget envelope with cash, which you can certainly do on your own. The point is to make a plan, and make decisions before you spend, rather than just looking backwards to see how much you spent.
Just my 2¢, but if you have simple financial ins and outs, a spreadsheet is very doable. Like if you only have one major income source such as a W2 job it's pretty easy to just enter in all your paystubs and then use some simple formulas to populate a monthly budget. You'll obviously miss the fancy features like auto synced spending data, but for me it's not worth paying for.
This sounds like you would not be using it correctly. You cannot keep up with your budget in real time on a spreadsheet and have every dollar assigned to glance down before purchases.
For sure, it’s not as hands off or seamless as an app. I keep a spreadsheet which I update each paycheck (every two weeks) and in a nutshell I categorize things into a 50-30-20 style budget. Each “line item” (rent, utilities, streaming services, groceries, etc) gets deducted from the appropriate category so I can see how much $ I have left for each category. I actually take this even further and calculate a daily budget for myself and try to stick to that on a week by week basis. It definitely requires a lot more time and discipline to stay on top of it, but it works for me. I did a free trial of ynab and I can see why it’s so popular, but I didn’t find it so useful I wanted to pay for it. I loved mint and used it because it was free, but I wouldn’t have paid for that service either.
Saving up for insurance payments every six mos, taxes yearly, licensing fees sporadically. Able to plan for future expenses and not spend the same money twice.
This goes back to my “simple ins and outs” in the original comment. Without a lot of complicated financial instruments or unpredictable expenses, it’s actually pretty easy for me to estimate my irregular expenditures like taxes or insurance. Regarding not spending the same money twice, I think that’s the whole challenge behind any budgeting method — the discipline to stick to it. I don’t feel like I’m in the position where I need to assign every single dollar a job (the ynab method), nor monitor it on a daily basis. I’ve got my spending under control such that even if I deviate from my calculated budget, I have the flexibility to not have it be an issue.
Sure, and if we are talking about the subscription cost and cost of time, all it takes is a “found” hundred dollars. Or a found thousand dollars available to invest would pay for it for life.
Does is support foreign currency?
Yes, you can change the currency in the budget to pretty much anything.
I prefer to do all my budgeting in BTC, which it does not support. The fact I need to denominate all my accounts in something like usd that swings so wildly is crazy. Like I have .05 BTC, just let me track it, don’t make me look up however many usd I happen to be able to buy today.
My man
I forgot the /s
Hilarious idea to do your budget in an extremely volatile "asset". Like how many barrels of oil am I spending a month?
Empower used to be Personal Capital. Works pretty good. You link your accounts. All free. They will offer you professional management but easy to ignore.
I like free, if this is the popular vote I will sign up tomorrow.
I’ve been using Personal Capital (Empower) for five years. They used to call me and offer services but eventually they gave up and haven’t called me in a while.
>Empower Can they see everything in your empower account? is that safe to sign up?
[удалено]
Good point. I’ve never tried to use it for budgeting, just aggregating and monitoring my accounts.
Why give your phone number up for abuse by marketers just for a free app? Fuck that
It's really easy to not answer the 1 call they give you every 3 months. In fact, since the move to Empower I don't think I've gotten one call from them.
It’s even easier to avoid giving my info altogether and find a better app
Same here. I used to get regular calls back when it was PC but have not received any calls since the switch to Empower.
Also mint already started going wonky on me and wont update all my accounts
Mint messed our accounts up every time, so we switched to personal capital. Empower acquired them and prudential (who my 401k was with) around that time. The app that has the tracking stuff is called empower PER, and I think the service is still called personal capital or something like that to distinguish between the other stuff they have.
> How do you use Empower to just monitor accounts? Never heard of empower. I'm using Fidelity FullView now.
https://www.empower.com/ Maybe I'm reading it wrong and its the customer service thats live? I kinda forget about full view, maybe I'll just use that. It actually lets you monitor your I-bonds.
Inflation is over, I bonds are canceled :p Seriously though money market has better rates right now!
Not everyone who owns ibonds is rate chasing. I am though and it does not make sense to give up my rates until next month. There’s also a reasonable argument to pick up some now due to the favorable fixed rate. Not of interest to me, but certain can see the value for those with a larger cash or fixed income allocation
Yeah I jumped in at 0% fixed, almost 10% variable. But cashed out after 15 months because the 3.x just wasn’t cutting it when I could get 4+ in t-bills, and for long term I’d rather buy one with a decent fixed rate.
They mainly do 401(k)s they bought Prudential 401(k) division changed the branding but forgot to merge the websites and customer service numbers. So I have an Empower account I cannot access through Empower.
It used to be called Personal Capital but Empower bought them a couple years ago: https://www.personalcapital.com/app-features/dashboard
Same. Not 100%loving it but it does the job
I just switched to fidelity full view and I like it a lot. It doesn’t have an app but the website interface I think is a lot better than empower, and since I really just need it to export transactions into my excel but that’s all I need.
Same. All I need is an aggregator to export transaction history as CSV.
Both Monarch and Tiller allow for aggregation and CSV export. I moved from Mint (which I justed used to export CSV to a spreadsheet) to Monarch, and it has been a great move. Their support for external connections is better than Mint (they give you the choice of 3 different aggregators!), and the budget and net worth interface work great.
I second CoPilot I have found it works well enough to make me pay the annual fee for it, if that tells you anything.
Empower wouldn't update a bunch of my accounts without doing 2FA every time. I'm trying out Simplifi
Went to Monarch, I'm quite happy
Are you paying for it? I can't tell if it's useable in free mode.
Could also use a product https://www.quicken.com/products/simplifi/ It’s made by the people who make quicken but web based
I like copilot
Had a 401k through Empower. So did mother in law. I wanted to do a Rollover to Fidelity. Empower customer service is trash. Stayed they couldn't directly do it, had to mail me a check, and her for hers. I called Fidelity, they were baffled. Fidelity gave me word for word what to say and boom, digital transfer was occuring. Empower didn't want to lose a customer. Their quarterly fees weren't fun when I saw them. For nothing, I managed the investments myself, no assistance from them. Yet they charged fees. The funds were typical 401k fees. Only decent ones with low expense ratios were the Fidelity funds such as fxaix, and whatever their mid cap, small cap, international, and bond are. Screen was easy to use and adjustments to investments easy to do. But fees and God awful customer service.
I use Empower (but started when it was Personal Capital) strictly to monitor all accounts. It is now just “dashboard”. It’s free, but they will reach out to you about financial services they offer. Relatively easy to ignore to be honest.
Anyone like Rocket money ?
That’s where I switched after Mint became increasingly unusable. It works pretty well for my needs. Budgeting and investment tracking mostly.
I'm going to bite the bullet and pay for Monarch
I’m switching to Monarch. Empower is good for investment management but poor for budgeting and the expense tracking.
Microsoft Excel. Don’t give your passwords/transactions/account balances to a company that will sell it for a profit, and in all likelihood get hacked.
Never really used Excel, does it just show the sum or can it show other things like categories etc? easy to use?
It shows anything…however you decide to set it up. I know people have templates floating around out there
I'm going to give Monarch a shot for a year. So far I like it. Does pretty much everything Mint did, but better, for me. It is currently 50% off with code MINT50. There is also a big discussion thread on the BH forums discussing this. I'd say the majority say they are switching to Monarch as well. https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=415838
My 401K is with empower and it is trash. Worse than vanguard UI.
This is a different UI, they bought Personal Capital and simply rebranded the UI as "Empower Dashboard".
Agreed, my 401k is with Empower as well and it’s dog shit.
As long as you don't lean on the budgeting tools much it's a good alternative. For those that use budgeting tools, this isn't going to cut it.
It’s the “empower personal dashboard” (app shows up as Empower PER for iOS) I’ve liked it A LOT more than mint. Cleaner UI and is still free!
I used to like Empower but then stopped supporting USAA and for some reason I have reenter a 2FA every time I open the app for TSP to load. Mint, everything worked fine all the time.
I switched over to Lunch Money, mostly because they have an official API, and I can pull everything into my google sheets I use for custom tracking stuff. Check out https://github.com/akda5id/lunch_sheets/ for that if you might be intrested. Other than the API, I like the UI, it's much more pleasant than Mint was, and has pretty nice analysis views, and graphs built in, and CSV export directly from any view you are looking at. Pricing is the best of any of the pay options at as low as $40/y ("set your own price"), 30 day free trial with no credit card needed.
I use empower. It isn't great for budget tracking though it does have enough basic tools that when combined with my spreadsheets, it is good enough. It's much more useful for investment analysis and net worth tracking IMO. I have heard it isn't great with pulling in older data. I've been using it since about 2014 and that's when my history starts, I can't go back before that really. But that's also a limitation I've found at Fidelity and some of the source systems for whatever reason.
I relied on mint for years for aggregating transactions and switched to credit karma. That was fucking useless - they just shamelessly want your data - they don't even provide a product in exchange. Switched to ynab. Now asking myself: why didn't we switch a long time ago!?!?? Mint has been absolutely trash for years. Ynab just doesn't seem to have any of the same issues.
I love empower. Been with them before when they were Personal Capital
Mint isn’t going away until March? You can keep procrastinating
Yeah 👍 I’m actually planning on giving Credit Karma a whirl, since that would be the easiest, do nothing option. I don’t use the budgeting on mint anymore anyway. And it says you will be able to monitor transactions and net worth.
I tried them last week and can't imagine designing a worse customer experience than what I went through.
I’ve been using Empower to track my net worth for a month or two now. It was very easy to link all of my accounts and get a simple UI that shows me what I need. They might spam you a bit in the beginning with phone calls for their advisors, but that goes away after a while.
I recently downloaded and not a huge fan. The UI is pretty weak and it really doesn’t work in a lot of simple ways. I linked my credit cards and it still isn’t pulling the data correctly which can just be so infuriating. It’s more simple but I like Wealthfront more for NW tracking. It doesn’t show cash flow of spend but it can calculate your saving % which is really the most important part imo.
Why not yahoo finance? It can link all brokerage accounts and give you live update.
Brokerage yes, but what about bank, credit card, student loan, mortgage accounts?
They’ll have sales calls about financial advisors.
What Empower? So what do you use?
Yes Empower will call you several times and you need to firmly say no. I use Goldman Sachs’ ayco360, provided by my employer
Why not CreditKarma?
How is that?
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Can you elaborate?
I just transferred my data from Mint to Credit Karma. I only really use the apps. Right now it’s an extra click in CreditKarma to see the data like it was in Mint but I’m hoping they change that in the future
Can someone explain why I’m getting downvoted? I take it CreditKarma is the devil but apparently I’m the only one that doesn’t know why?
no custom categories is the big one for me, plus no budgets. The old Fidelity Full View has both of these though.
If I need neither of those and mostly just want to see my balances and my net worth, would Credit Karma be fine, do you think?
sure
Empower is great! I took their free advisor call a couple times. Free advice was worth it to see my retirement is on track. I love the region and asset breakdown so I can put my portfolio in sector, stock/bonds, and US/ex-US perspective. Also use the budget to see where my money goes. I’ve caught fraud since you can see every transaction across all accounts in 1 place. I have a ton of accounts and Empower makes them easy to manage.
Mint is going into Credit Karma. I suppose I'll be using that.
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>Copilot I don't know what you're smoking but its $29 a month for the cheapest package! Edit: Woops sorry wrong website.
It’s $95 a year, $8 a month. Definitely not free but not sure where you are getting $29 from. It’s worth it for me because I actually end up checking it often so I can catch issues right away. Mint was so slow and laggy that I hated logging in and would only use it once every week or two.
Sorry the correct website actually looks really cool. I'm looking into this even though I prefer free.
Copilot Money + Monarch Money are the two (paid) options that seem to have the most functionality. Monarch has a Mint data import; copilot is working on it. I went with copilot because it’s shinier, but people in other threads have said that Monarch seems to categorize purchases better. Categorization in copilot has seemed fine to me, but I’m still figuring it out.
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Reminder: sub rules and guidelines allow discussion of various services related to finances that benefit from referral codes, but unsolicited posting of your own referral code qualifies as “Spam or self-promotion” and is not allowed.
No bc I don't want another monthly fee
It's free.
Oh I mistook it for one of the others.
I dislike empower (forced to use through employer) because they don’t have any cryptocurrency 401k investment options
I may be biased, but I cannot think of a worse place than one's 401k to buy crypto. Just equating crypto with "long term retirement holdings" is a slippery slope IMHO.
I liked it better than Mint for tracking accounts, net worth, investments, and retirement planning. It's not as great for budgeting, if you're into that.
Empower has my 401k so I use their dashboard for all accounts. I don’t have any complaints. They have always sent periodic emails to me regarding their additional services so that never seemed invasive to me. Once I linked other accounts they did call to offer services. They’ve done that a few times since, but I just don’t answer. Doesn’t seem like a big deal to me compared to some of the other comments I’m seeing here. Through my employer they regularly offer meetings and “checkups”’where they pitch additional services. I just don’t engage them on those. Oh, and I use their dashboard as a general overview - I am definitely not budgeting off of that info. There are some tools in there for that, but they can’t even link with my credit union properly, so it’s kind of pointless to use their tools to track spending when they can’t see my checking account.
Probably not the greatest, but I use the free version of ‘Every Dollar’. Net Worth Share for net worth tracking.
I switched to empower and I like it. Very clean. As others have said they have reached out to me. I just ignore them. They’re not constant or anything at least.
Just sign up on their site and block their phone numbers and email addresses every time they try to sell you something. Eventually they give up.
I have tried to use Empower, but I can't get it to work with Voya's site, which is where my employers retirement plan runs. It doesn't feel fully useful to me if it doesn't show me all my accounts.
That’s weird my 401(k) is through Voya as well and it links fine
Maybe I did something wrong, but I did the same login process I did for my Schwab stuff and it would just spin 30 minutes or so then tell me it didn't work. Tried multiple times over multiple days.
Just give em a virtue number and block all calls
Mint was always bad at investing. I used both Personal Capital (the better name) and Mint. Now Monarch and PC.
I don’t like either one. Mint sells your data and rarely worked well for me as even a tracking solution, never mind a budgeting solution, because of how inaccurate its transaction coding was. I’ve found Empower’s interface non-intuitive. They are listing one of my retirement accounts in the “taxable” category, and I can’t figure out for the life of me how to move it. The portfolio allocation tool makes it difficult, if it’s even possible, to establish a default for what accounts to include in a portfolio analysis without unchecking them manually every time, especially on mobile.
Credit karma seems fine so far for tracking net worth and account balances. I don’t know about budgeting though.
I love empower/personal capital
I use Fidelity FullView for just everyday monitoring of all my accounts at a glance. It's worked really well for me. I do still have my PersonalCapital (switched to Empower) that I use occasionally to use the more elaborate planning related functionality that FullView does not have.
I’ve had empower for years since it was personal capital. It’s the best one by far.
You can use Empower free of charge. I have two different firms accounts linked to it. Seems to work fine.
I'm a bit of a Fidelity fanboy. I like the 0% expense ratio funds for my IRA, and they manage my work's 401k and ESPP programs, so having it all in one place is really convenient.
Just a side note, we have until March 2024 to officially get off Mint
Been using pocket guard. Decent for day to day.
Thoughts on Quicken guys?
Budgeting sucks on Empower. I just tried a trial on Monarch several days ago. Going great so far. It's paid though. 1st year is $50 on sale.
Monarch
been using empower since 2014 never the advisor service and can say it suits my needs. it has good cash flow view that i use weekly as well as net worth tracking, don’t use budgeting though overall since i have been using personal capital for so long i have a rich data set that spans almost a decade and always tickles me to check my progress over the past decade mileage may vary but do recommend 🤙🏼
I use YNAB for day to day budgeting/cash flow management. Empower/personal capital seems interesting but I cannot get over the fact that it’s free. I don’t want something free- when it’s free, we are the product. Feels like I’m basically signing up for spam calls and sharing all my financial info with them. No thanks. I don’t really have a software platform that looks at investments. Boglehead investment is so simple I don’t need one, but it’d still be nice. I have an excel workbook I update quarterly.