Empower

What Is Empower?

Empower — formerly Personal Capital before Empower acquired it in 2023 — is a financial dashboard that aggregates all your accounts in one place. Bank accounts, credit cards, mortgages, student loans, 401(k)s, IRAs, brokerage accounts: everything shows up on a single screen with your total net worth front and center.

The free tools include a net worth tracker, spending analysis, budgeting features, a retirement planner, an investment checkup, and a fee analyzer that identifies hidden costs in your investment accounts. These are genuinely useful and available without paying anything.

The paid side is a wealth management service. If you have $100,000 or more in investable assets, Empower offers professional portfolio management starting at 0.89% of assets under management. This is how Empower makes money — and why the free tools exist: they’re designed to attract users who might eventually sign up for wealth management.

How Empower Helps with Debt Payoff

Net worth context. Most debt payoff apps show you your debts and nothing else. Empower shows you everything — debts, savings, investments, property, all of it. This broader view can be genuinely motivating. Watching your net worth climb from negative to zero to positive is powerful. It turns “I owe $22,000” into “My net worth went from -$22,000 to -$15,000 this year,” which feels like the progress it actually is.

Spending analysis. Empower automatically categorizes your transactions and shows you where your money goes each month. If you’re looking for extra cash to throw at debt payments, seeing that you spent $480 on dining out last month gives you something specific to work with. The spending tools aren’t as detailed as dedicated budgeting apps, but they’re useful for identifying obvious areas to cut.

The complete picture. If you have both debt and retirement accounts, Empower helps you see how they relate. Should you pause 401(k) contributions to pay off debt faster? Empower won’t tell you the answer directly, but seeing both numbers side by side makes the decision clearer. You can also use the retirement planner to model how different debt payoff timelines affect your long-term financial trajectory.

Fee analyzer. This isn’t directly related to debt payoff, but it’s worth mentioning. If you’re paying 1.2% in investment fees when you could be paying 0.1%, that difference compounds over decades. The fee analyzer flags this kind of waste. Money saved on investment fees is money that can work for you — including helping you pay off debt or build wealth faster once you’re debt-free.

Limitations for Debt Payoff

No debt payoff strategy tools. This is the big one. Empower doesn’t offer snowball or avalanche tracking. You can’t enter your debts and get a prioritized payoff schedule. You can’t compare strategies or see how extra payments shorten your timeline. If your primary goal is building and following a debt payoff plan, Empower isn’t the tool for the job.

The wealth management upsell. Once Empower knows your financial picture, expect phone calls and emails encouraging you to sign up for their wealth management service. If you have more than $100,000 in investable assets, the outreach can be persistent. For some users, this crosses the line from helpful to annoying.

Complexity. Empower was designed for people managing a complicated financial life — multiple investment accounts, retirement planning, tax optimization. If you’re in the early stages of getting out of debt and just want a simple plan, Empower’s feature-rich interface can feel like overkill. You might spend more time learning the dashboard than actually paying off debt.

Account syncing issues. Some users report that account connections break periodically and need to be re-linked. This is a common problem across financial aggregation apps, but Empower seems to experience it more frequently than some competitors. When your accounts aren’t syncing, your net worth number and spending data become unreliable.

When Tracking Net Worth During Debt Payoff Makes Sense

You might wonder whether it’s even useful to track net worth when you’re in debt. For some people, it is.

If you have a 401(k) with $50,000 and credit card debt of $15,000, your net worth is positive. Seeing that number can provide perspective that a debt-only view doesn’t offer. It reminds you that you’re not starting from zero — you have assets even while you have debt.

Net worth tracking also helps you make better decisions about trade-offs. Should you keep contributing to your 401(k) employer match while paying off debt? Net worth tracking makes the impact of both visible.

But if debt tracking alone feels overwhelming and you just want to focus on paying it off, there’s nothing wrong with keeping it simple. A dedicated debt payoff app might serve you better until you’re debt-free, at which point Empower becomes much more relevant for the wealth-building phase.

Our Take

Empower is an impressive financial tool with a genuinely useful free tier. The net worth tracking, investment analysis, and retirement planning features are among the best available at any price. If you want to see your entire financial life in one place, it delivers.

But as a debt payoff tool, it falls short. No payoff strategies, no debt prioritization, no progress tracking toward becoming debt-free. It shows you the what (how much you owe and own) but not the how (the plan to eliminate your debt).

The best approach: use a dedicated debt payoff app for your day-to-day payoff strategy, and check in with Empower periodically to see how your overall financial picture is improving. Watching your net worth trend upward while your debt trends downward is one of the most satisfying things you can track during a payoff journey.