How are you designing your investment portfolio for the future?
It takes a lot of efforts to manage, design, and monitor your assets by yourself, but the cost of the advice from a professional financial planner is expensive, right?
Not only providing a tool for household account book management for managing daily expenses and income, “Empower (FKA: Personal Capital)” will take you to one step further as an excellent tool for managing, designing, and monitoring your assets.
What is Empower?
Empower, like Mint, can be used as a household account book tool, but it provides a very powerful service in terms of investment analysis.
Like Mint, it allows you to see information about your financial accounts aggregately, and also you can compare the performance of your investment portfolio with each benchmark, compare investment fees, analyze portfolio risks and allocations, and even make life financial planning with detailed advice.
In addition, the paid version offered to customers with assets of $100,000 or more advises you with AI and human financial advisors to develop the right investment portfolio.
Empower’s Key Points
Retirement Planner
It’s no exaggeration to say that the centerpiece of Empower is the Retirement Planner.
As the name suggests, it’s about planning your retirement.
Entering the required information, such as your desired retirement age, retirement expenditure, annual savings until retirement, and pension, you can visually simulate the probability of future investment goal success, as shown in the image above.
The amount of expenditure during the retirement and the annual saving until the retirement age is automatically calculated by the tool, reading the current pattern of the deposit and expenditure record of the linked accounts, so it is easy for those who do not know the specific amount of expenditure and saving you would like to achieve.
For those who want more detailed planning, you are free to take into account the expected expenditures at life events, such as marriage and education or change income tax and inflation rates.
You can also create several patterns of retirement planning, such as planning for different retirement ages, and visually compare each plan.
Retirement Fee Analyzer
The next reason to recommend Empower is to tell you how much cost you’re paying for your portfolio in your pension account, such as 401(k) and IRA.
For long-term investments, it is really important to lower operating costs. The Retirement Fee Analyzer allows you to understand your current operating costs and compare them to benchmarks to see if they are within the right range.
Investment Checkup
The Investment Checkup feature monitors your investment portfolio from time to time to provide you with a variety of information and investment advices.
For example, it displays the current asset allocation and suggests the optimal asset allocation according to your risk tolerance, etc.
It also graphs current returns and risks, and you can see how much return you can expect from your portfolio and how much risk it involves.
Cashflow
The Cash Flow feature serves as a household account book, providing its role in budget management.
Automatic Information Collection
After you link your accounts and credit card to Empower, each transaction when you use your account or credit card is automatically recorded to Empower. Yes, you do not have to waste your time to enter your transaction manually every time anymore!
Automatic Categorization by Expenditure
I mainly shop with a credit card, and Empower automatically determines and categorize what kind of payment is made according to the retailer I pay to. For example, if you use a credit card at McDonald’s, Empower will automatically categorize the expenditure into food expenses.
Review of Household Finances
It is easy to review the breakdown of expenses and income for specified periods, such as monthly. Particularly convenient is the ability to compare the trends in income and expenses between the current and previous periods.
Net Worth
The Net Worth feature allows you to check your financial position. It is handy as it visually displays the asset status for each financial institution account and tracks the changes in credit card balances.
Savings Planner
The last feature I recommend is the Savings Planner.
With this feature, you can see the current status of your annual savings goal by account type.
It also shows the balance of emergency funds and provides a recommended emergency fund balance, as shown in the image above.
You can also visually see how the balance of your debts changed historically, including credit cards, mortgages, and other loans.
Referral Campaign
When you register with Empower using the link below, you can currently get $20.
Summary
In this article, I introduced Empower as a powerful tool that supports budgeting as well as asset allocation, planning, and management.
It offers such a rich set of features and is basically free to use, so be sure to use Empower to get rid of future financial concerns.
コメント