Empower Personal Finance Tools Review

Breadth of Services

Empower  offers a wide range of features to help you take control of your finances. It provides a convenient way to monitor all of your financial accounts in one central location. If you’ve struggled to save money in the past, Empower can be helpful in various ways. The first is its automatic savings feature. Simply tell the Empower app how much you want to save. Autosave kicks in when the app determines—based on your expected expenses and your current account balance—that you have some extra cash and can afford to save while still paying all of your bills on time.  

The Empower app allows you to segregate your expenses into specific categories like dining, retail, and entertainment and set specific budgets for each category. Periodically, it will update you on how you are tracking against your spending goals. When you approach the limit of a budget you have set, the app sends an alert to help you curtail your spending. It’s up to you, of course, whether you will heed the app’s warning. But simple awareness is an important step toward living within the means you’ve outlined for yourself.  

Empower also searches for ways you can save money on your cable, internet, or phone bills and suggests new services to investigate to lower your expenses. It lets you know when a bill you normally pay increases and affords you the opportunity to investigate the change or find a less expensive service. The app also tracks the subscriptions you pay for and will cancel any of them that you’re not using on your behalf. It may sound like a small thing, but how many of us have “meant to cancel” but never find the time to do it on our own? Empower also keeps track of any payments you may have missed and your credit utilization which helps you protect your credit score.

Pricing

Empower offers a free 30-day trial, after which customers pay $8 per month for access to all of the app’s features. There are no overdraft fees or monthly maintenance fees associated with the Empower checking account. The account returns interest at a rate of 0.25% APY and interest is compounded daily. Empower does not impose a minimum balance restriction on its checking accounts, so whatever you have in your account will earn interest. Nowadays, that’s a pretty good interest rate, particularly for a no-minimum-balance account.

The Empower checking account does limit of free cash ATM withdrawals to three per month, however. If you prefer to pay for daily expenses in cash, you’ll probably need to make infrequent large ATM withdrawals rather than taking money out of your account on an as-needed basis to avoid racking up ATM fees. But using cash to pay for a lot of things also defeats some of the features the Empower app offers, including tracking your overall spending, and analyzing your spending habits by category, for example. 

Educational Resources

Empower doesn’t provide a large library of general financial information for customers. The company’s website isn’t the place to visit if you’re hoping to learn about investing in ETFs or buying cryptocurrency, for example. That’s because, unlike some personal finance apps that integrate brokerage accounts and IRAs, Empower’s purview is limited to saving and spending, not investing. But Empower is very good at the things it promises to do for customers.  Rather than offer a lot of general advice, the app helps customers get a handle on the specifics of their own financial circumstances which, for a lot of people, is exactly what they need to get them on track to greater financial security. 

Customer Experience

For customers who find thinking about money a bore, a bother, or even an emotional burden, Empower just might be the app that puts the fun in finance. Setting up your account, linking your bank, credit card, loan, and other accounts, and creating a personalized, category-by-category budget is easy. Making changes to settings as your needs change is simple, as well. 

The Empower app interface is visually appealing, with easy-to-read screens and reports. The frequent alerts and savings recommendations the app sends makes mindful spending a simple habit to adopt, even for the most financially-passive among us. 

While Empower is an app and not classified as a financial advisor by law, the company does provide access to financial coaching. Users are encouraged to contact one of Empower’s human coaches for one-on-one chats should they come across a specific financial challenge they need help managing.

Screenshot from empower.me, August 2020

Reputation

Empower is not rated by the BBB. It earns a 3-star rating on Trust Pilot, but that average score is based on only one review. When we scanned the financial press, we found that the app has earned praise from financial journalists, particularly for its intuitive interface and for the broad, integrated picture it provides of your finances. Empower employs 256-bit SSL end-to-end data encryption, multi-factor authentication, Touch ID, and strict access controls to safeguard customer transactions and privacy. These measures are on par with many other banking applications, though some institutions go further. Cybersecurity is a constantly evolving field and all of us would do well to make sure all of the apps we use are addressing new risks with innovative technology.

Empower Summed Up

Empower offers users easy-to-use tools to create and manage a budget and improve their spending habits. The app corrals a wide range of accounts in one place to give users a detailed picture of their financial position, however serious investors may want an app that facilitates in-app investment and sophisticated investment analysis features.