Empower Review: 2026 Edition

Disclosure: Empower Personal Wealth, LLC (“EPW”) compensates Fortunly.com for new leads. Fortunly.com is not an investment client of Empower Advisory Group, LLC.

Investments and retirement are two words that are bound to make even the most prepared and grounded of individuals nervous. Figuring out how and where to invest in or what plans are best to ensure your retirement will go smoothly can often be hard to accomplish on one’s own.

Therefore, the go-to move is to find a financial service that will help guide your steps. That in itself is often a mission, but Empower is here to help.

Empower Overview

When it comes to personal finance issues, most financial sites offer few options regarding investment tracking tools. Empower, on the other hand, places its focus on retirement planning and investments.

Empower is an online financial advisor. It combines robo-advisory algorithms and practices with access to real financial advisors, making the user experience more personal.

The service offers a variety of views on users’ holdings, gives personalized advice and estimations on retirement plans, and also offers state-of-the-art features for cryptocurrency tracking and transaction management.

Using Empower requires a minimum investment of $100,000 for Personal Strategy, while clients who invest more than $250,000 can access Personal Strategy Wealth Management.

Empower also offers Private Client services for households investing more than $1 million.

The service charges asset-based advisory fees that decline as assets grow, with the full fee schedule outlined in Empower’s Form ADV. These fees provide a solid incentive for accounts with larger balances, dropping significantly as your investment size grows.

The service comes with a ton of investment and financial planning tools. Some of these tools are already free to the general public.

Additionally, users can link existing accounts, track the performance of their portfolios, retirement progress, net worth, and even a spending tracker.

There is also the retirement feature, which helps clients plan withdrawals in advance and helps them with their tax optimization strategy.

Performance

Empower really shines with investments. Its current service structure is built around Personal Strategy, Personal Strategy Wealth Management, and Private Client services.

Personal Strategy is available at $100,000, Personal Strategy Wealth Management is available above $250,000, and Private Client service starts above $1 million.

As we already mentioned, the service takes a personalized advisory strategy, which means it not only views the assets it manages but also considers the entire finances of the client. Through the Smart Weighting service, its portfolio selection process, Empower puts equal investments in all sectors - unlike the S&P 500 index.

Empower says this strategy for managing portfolios operates on the basis of less risk-more return, which is what every investor hopes for. The company continues to present Smart Weighting as a way to build more diversified portfolios across sectors, styles, and sizes.

This portfolio management strategy also helps Empower find more opportunities for tax-loss harvesting. Additionally, because the company uses individual securities, it can target and sell them when the need arises.

To cap it all off, the company is also keen on using socially responsible strategies. To accomplish this, it screens United States equities based on several factors: social, governance, and environmental.

Available Tools

Users are privy to comprehensive and free tools, including a 401(k) fee analyzer, a spending tracker, and an investment checkup. While you must create a login identity to access these tools and use them, the great thing about Empower is that it doesn’t require you to enroll in the advisory service.

Once you have signed up and created your account, you can link your bank as well as credit card and brokerage accounts.

Based on the information Empower finds, it analyzes the allocation of assets in your accounts and informs you on how much exactly you need to increase or decrease on an asset class in line with the recommended target.

DIY investors will find this especially useful, as they can make their adjustments based on this advice. Other tools include:

Spending Analysis

This looks at your cash flow and categorizes your expenses into groups like healthcare, groceries, feeding, and clothing. It also tracks bills due and income sources.

Retirement Planner

Empower examines your investment accounts with the retirement planner to predict whether you can meet your needs when you retire. These needs can be adjusted, along with expected Social Security tax and income, your life expectancy, and assumptions on investment returns.

The retirement planner takes real-time data from your account and records your daily financial activity, using that to update the estimates of your predicted spending during retirement.

Dedicated Financial Advisors

Empower’s advisory service includes access to financial advisors who can help with retirement planning, taxes, and broader wealth strategy. The advisors are available through email, video chat, and phone.

Dashboard

The dashboard is another one of Empower’s offerings. With this feature, you can view details about your account such as your net worth, portfolio allocation and balances, as well as cash flow. There is also a module detailing your holdings that shows you the performance of your investments, with a percentage view of your entire portfolio. You can also see the investments that are gainers and losers.

And assets get managed, the more tools and services apply to the account. These additional tools and services include home financing, private banking services, stock options construction of the estate, tax, or legacy portfolios, and college savings planning.

Financial Roadmap

Empower also offers a Financial Roadmap designed to turn your account data into a more practical action plan.

That makes the platform more than a simple investment tracker, especially for users trying to connect spending, saving, and retirement goals.

Empower Personal Cash

There is a list of financial advisors offering accounts with high-interest cash management online. Empower joined that list when it launched Empower Personal Cash in 2019.

This account pays users 3.00% APY, with the rate increasing to 3.30% APY when qualifying direct deposits are set up, does not require a minimum account balance, and is free from the regular management fee that the company charges.

In a nutshell, you do not have to invest with Empower to use this cash account.

However, if you are an investing customer with the company and use the cash account as well, you become eligible for a bump in your cash account’s interest rate. Empower Personal Cash is protected with FDIC insurance of up to $5 million in aggregate through participating program banks.

Mobile App

Empower’s mobile app is available on both iOS and Android and is quite different from the web platform.

The opening screen shows a graph for the user net worth, totals for assets and liabilities, as well as account balances.

The panel links to the website’s major dropdown menus, but it is an abbreviated version of the web platform.

All transactions made can be viewed from the app, but you cannot add new ones, while budgeting and cash flow are represented in registers and charts.

The investment tools are much better on the website, but you can still access your holdings and portfolio allocation from the app. You can also use the retirement planner tool.

The app offers a great user experience all-around.

Private Client

Empower also offers its clients a private service, which provides tax-efficient portfolio customization and gives access to select private investments for certain qualified clients.

This service is geared toward households with more than $1 million invested with Empower, while some private investment opportunities may require at least $5 million managed by the firm.

Other features include security settings like multi-factor authentication and Foreign Login Alert when you (or someone else) log in from an unknown device, as well as a new feature that Empower uses to track cryptocurrency. Empower also maintains a dedicated cybersecurity section covering account protection and online security practices.

Our Verdict

Empower offers its clients a variety of services, providing support for taxable accounts, IRAs, rollovers, trusts, cash accounts, and broader financial planning needs. It also offers advisory services for portfolio management and retirement planning, while giving non-advisory users access to a very strong set of free planning and tracking tools.

That’s stellar service. It does, however, fall short in some areas, such as its account minimum requirement. The $100,000 minimum is quite a high figure, and it makes Empower’s wealth management services out of reach for many customers.

The cost is also driven up by management fees, but these can be discounted to very reasonable amounts, depending on your total balance.

Investors with account balances under $1 million will generally pay more than they would with lower-cost robo-advisors, which makes Empower a better fit for users who want a more hands-on service and a wider planning toolkit.

Nevertheless, the pros will outweigh the cons for a lot of people. Empower’s services make the financial advisor one of the best options on the market, though it is clearly aimed at bigtime investors first and foremost.