By Eric Rosenberg, WCI ContributorIf you’re looking to track your finances and plan for the future, you may be interested in Boldin and Empower. Both offer the ability to track your finances with a focus on the future, but each offers a unique experience tailored to different preferences and needs. Here’s a closer look at Boldin vs. Empower to understand the best financial tracking and planning app for your financial goals.
[EDITOR'S NOTE: Full disclosure: The White Coat Investor has a financial relationship with Boldin and an affiliate relationship with Empower. (Remember how affiliate links work: if you invest after going through our links, WCI gets paid, but it doesn't cost you any more to go through that link.) However, the writer of this post had free reign to rate and write about Boldin and Empower how he saw fit.]
Boldin vs. Empower: Company Backgrounds
Boldin
Formerly known as NewRetirement, Boldin is a unique software solution to track your finances in one place and to get ideas and advice for how to improve your finances for the future. The company’s mission is to “help anyone get confident and achieve financial independence so they can make the most of their money and time.”
According to Boldin data at the time of this writing, it has helped 200,000 individuals build financial plans and has managed more than $200 million in assets. Through the Boldin API (a tool allowing users to tap into Boldin features on other websites), more than 5 million people use Boldin calculators and tools.
Empower
Formerly known as Personal Capital, Empower is a financial app and investment advisor. The free personal finance app offers the ability to track all of your financial accounts with a focus on investments. The investment service is a paid offering but isn’t required to use the free investment software.
Empower claims $1.4 trillion in assets under management, as of this writing. More than 18 million people use Empower products and services.
More information here:
Boldin Review: An Online Retirement Calculator on Steroids
Features and Services
Boldin
Boldin offers three tiers of its software and service combo. The free version includes basic software features in a self-service tool. It includes simple retirement planning as well as financial account tracking.
With the second tier, you get all software features—including more financial planning features, net worth monitoring, digital financial coaching, more insights, and comparisons between multiple financial scenarios. At this tier, you also get access to group online financial education classes.
The top tier is a major step up in price and includes access to a Certified Financial Planner (CFP) and more comprehensive financial planning.
Empower
Empower offers free investment tracking software that helps you view all financial accounts in one place with helpful insights to improve your investments. Tools offer a deep dive into your asset allocation, investment fees, and just about anything else you might want to know about your current portfolio.
You can upgrade to the wealth management service if you have at least $100,000 in investable assets (cash and brokerage accounts). Pricing decreases as your portfolio with Empower increases in size. Human advisors help you manage budgets, investments, and taxes with a technology-enabled platform.
User Experience and Interface
Boldin
The main dashboard helps you organize your finances in one place with a focus on retirement. It compares your current outlook with your retirement plan to help you understand if you’re on track for your goals.
With paid tiers, it turns that data into actionable insights to help you make the best financial decisions. You’ll receive detailed comparisons and plans that help you make investment decisions and compare financial decisions. It’s an action-oriented platform that’s intuitive and interesting. Think of it as a turbo-charged financial calculator.
Empower
The Empower personal finance dashboard is intuitive, with sections focused on cash flow, net worth, and investments put front and center. You can navigate through your holdings, balances, and asset allocation, among other portfolio details. You can view your cash flow, bills, and budget on the budgeting side.
The retirement fee analyzer and investment checkup are two standout tools, offering valuable insights that can help you improve your long-term investment outlook.
More information here:
Cost and Pricing Structure
Boldin
Boldin offers three pricing tiers:
For the free and PlannerPlus tiers, Boldin is an excellent value for high-income professionals. The Advisors tier is worthwhile for households that don’t want a traditional financial advisor but are looking for extra help managing their money.
Empower
For Empower, the software is free. If you upgrade to a paid financial advisor, pricing is based on the size of your portfolio under management:
The Bottom Line
Boldin offers a robust range of services, from basic financial tracking to advanced planning with CFPs. It caters to those seeking detailed, interactive financial planning and education. Modeling scenarios and changing assumptions are its strengths. It is also very useful for tweaking your plan slightly or just updating it every year. Boldin is well worth your time and certainly worth your money.
Conversely, Empower, known for investment tracking and wealth management, is ideal for those with significant investable assets, offering tools like a retirement fee analyzer and an investment checkup. It's certainly a good option to track your cash flow and portfolio, particularly if you wish to view your investments across all of your accounts to better understand your overall portfolio makeup.
Both Boldin and Empower present unique strengths tailored to different financial needs. Boldin excels in action-oriented financial planning, while Empower is a standout in investment analysis and wealth management. To identify the best platform for your financial journey, consider exploring both options, focusing on how each aligns with your specific financial goals and strategies.
Have you had experiences with either Boldin or Empower? What did you like? What didn't you like? Are there other options out there?
I am a retired EVS Director and I have tried all of these retirement planning software systems……..kind of like it is my hobby.
Yes they are all good………..but I have decided on the one that is free and is closes enough to the best and is FREE.
It is Fidelity!!!!!!!!!! Yes that is right…..FIDELITY.
You should check it out……….graphics are just as good as New Retirement. It is much easier to use.
Give it a try.
Thanks for the hint, but where exactly is that planning system within the Fidelity website?
Go on the Fidelity web site and if you don’t see it under “retirement planning” then go to their search engine in the upper right corner and type in “Retirement Planning”
I’m assuming your referring to Full View. I love it’s ability to calculate my net worth every day if I want (but it won’t store the history). That calculator is decent but if you have enough assets to get a “free advisor”, your advisor may have the training to run a professional calculator using your Full View data (it’s not a Fidelity calculator) and provide consultations for your individual situation. They can run some scenarios to look at different Roth conversion scenarios, investment return assumptions (plug in %, not just average, below average, etc.), RMD estimates, etc. Drawback is that customers don’t get access to this calculator and you can only have your advisor run a few what-if analysis since they can only do so much for you “for free”.
yes I do the exact same team on the full view screen
I also love the pie charts
I don’t use a financial planner……….occassionally I use the fidelity planner just to have a different set of eyes on my plan…….I don’t even have any Fidelity funds anymore!!!!!!
As to the Roth conversions………..don’t use any of these softewars for that ……….I just do a mock 1040 form and then back door how big a conversion to do up to the next tax bracket
I’m just going to say I bought the NewRetirement and never got it to work one day. That would have been bad, but my efforts to get it working were rebuffed as in “you DON’T know how to do this?” with no “help” response. I would ask for my money back but I’m sure that would be as successful.
Send me an email at editor (at) whitecoatinvestor.com and we’ll see what we can do to help.
Thanks. Appreciate it.
That was my experience as well.
Here, let me rewrite that Empower fee table for you:
Assets—————-Annual Fee
Up to $1M———$0-$8,900
Up to $3M———$7,900-$23,700
Next $2M———-$23,700-$34,500
Next $5M———-$34,500-$59,000
Over $10M——–>$49,000
Thank you for calculating this!
Hi Eric, nice summary. Do you have any thoughts on Empower’s investing advice on using a US equal weighted sector strategy and if you would get any alpha compared to just investing in the total US stock market?
You didn’t ask me, but I suggest you chart performance for the ETF EQAL and compare it to VTI. You will see that equal weighting has lagged throughout that ETF’s existence. Someday maybe all these “Magnificent Seven” type stocks will be laid low and equal-weighting might have it’s day in the sun, but I suspect that by the time that happens (if it ever does) the equal-weighting portfolio will be so far behind that it can’t catch up.
TL;DR: Unless you have a firm conviction that the top-ten stocks in VTI are only worth a small fraction of their current valuation, stick with market cap weighting.
thanks! just comparing briefly it looks like yup, EQAL has lagged, and also it has lagged the Russell 1000 to EQAL. also seems the Russell 1000 seems to have done very similar to VTI. I knew that the S&P 500 and VTI are highly correlated, but even adding 500 more stocks to the S&P500 in the form of the Russell 1000 didn’t really change return much.
Just comes to show that you are not really capturing much of the small companies in a market weighted index. I myself do have a small cap value tilt for this reason, but I had always initially obsessed that I want a total stock market index, not the S&P500. I’m coming to realize it doesn’t matter all that much.
Oh come on guys. Equal weighting is just a small and value tilt. So when small and value underperform (and they have for quite a long time now), equal weighting will underperform cap weighting and vice versa. It does introduce some additional costs though compared to cap weighting which can further drag performance down.
I think there are better ways to get a SV tilt.