Empower vs. Boldin: A Head-to-Head Comparison for DIY Retirement Planners
retirement planning can feel like navigating a complex maze. Luckily, a plethora of digital tools aim to simplify the process, providing insights, tracking progress, and even offering personalized advice. Two popular platforms in this space are Empower (formerly Personal Capital) and Boldin. While both strive to empower users to manage their financial futures, they differ significantly in their approach and capabilities. This article will break down their features and DIY retirement planning capabilities to help you decide which platform best suits your needs.
Empower: The Comprehensive Financial Dashboard
Empower positions itself as an all-in-one financial dashboard. Its core strength lies in its ability to aggregate all your accounts – bank accounts, investment portfolios, credit cards, and even loans – into a single, easily accessible view.
Key Features for retirement planning:
- Free Financial Dashboard: Aggregates accounts for a holistic view of your finances.
- Net Worth Tracking: Calculates and tracks your net worth over time.
- Retirement Planner: Offers a retirement calculator that projects your potential retirement income based on current savings, contributions, and estimated expenses. Allows for scenario planning, considering different market conditions, inflation rates, and retirement ages.
- Investment Checkup: Analyzes your portfolio’s asset allocation, identifying potential risks and suggesting diversification strategies.
- Fee Analyzer: Detects hidden fees in your investment accounts.
- Spending Tracker: Categorizes your spending to identify areas where you can save more.
- Managed Wealth Service (Optional): For users who prefer hands-off investing, Empower offers a managed wealth service with personalized investment strategies.
Pros:
- Comprehensive Account Aggregation: Connects to a wide range of financial institutions.
- Robust Free Features: Offers a wealth of free tools for tracking and analyzing your finances.
- User-Friendly Interface: The dashboard is intuitive and easy to navigate.
- Investment Checkup: Provides valuable insights into your portfolio’s performance and potential risks.
- Managed Wealth Option: Offers a hands-off investment solution for those who prefer professional management.
Cons:
- Upselling of Managed Wealth Service: Users may experience sales pitches for Empower’s paid advisory services.
- Limited Customization in Free Retirement Planner: While scenario planning is available, the free planner may not offer the granularity some users desire.
- Data Privacy Concerns (though improving): As with any platform aggregating sensitive financial data, users should be aware of data privacy implications.
Boldin: The Simplified Retirement Planner
Boldin takes a more focused approach, emphasizing simplicity and ease of use. Its primary objective is to help users quickly understand their retirement readiness and identify steps to improve their financial future.
Key Features for retirement planning:
- Simplified Retirement Calculator: Provides a quick and easy assessment of your retirement readiness based on limited inputs.
- Personalized Retirement Roadmap: Generates a customized action plan based on your retirement goals and current financial situation.
- “What-If” Scenarios: Allows you to easily explore the impact of different savings rates, retirement ages, and investment returns on your retirement outcome.
- Goal Tracking: Monitors your progress towards your retirement goals.
- Simplified Interface: Designed for ease of use, even for users with limited financial knowledge.
- Financial Education Resources: Offers access to articles and educational materials on retirement planning.
Pros:
- Extremely User-Friendly: The simplified interface makes it easy for anyone to get started.
- Quick Retirement Assessment: Provides a rapid snapshot of your retirement readiness.
- Personalized Action Plan: Offers concrete steps to improve your retirement prospects.
- Clear and Concise Reporting: Presents information in an easy-to-understand format.
- Strong Focus on Education: Provides access to resources to improve your financial literacy.
Cons:
- Limited Account Aggregation: Doesn’t offer the comprehensive account aggregation capabilities of Empower.
- Less Granular Data Input: The simplified approach may not allow for the level of detail some users desire.
- Fewer Advanced Features: Lacks some of the more sophisticated features found in Empower, such as investment checkups and fee analyzers.
- Subscription Fee: Boldin is a subscription-based service, whereas Empower offers a robust free tier.
The Verdict: Which Platform is Right for You?
Choosing between Empower and Boldin depends on your individual needs and preferences.
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Choose Empower if:
- You want a comprehensive financial dashboard that aggregates all your accounts.
- You’re comfortable navigating a more complex interface.
- You want access to advanced features like investment checkups and fee analyzers.
- You’re looking for a robust free option.
- You might be interested in a managed wealth service in the future.
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Choose Boldin if:
- You want a simple and easy-to-use retirement planning tool.
- You’re looking for a quick and personalized assessment of your retirement readiness.
- You value a clear and concise action plan.
- You’re willing to pay a subscription fee for simplicity and guidance.
- You are overwhelmed by the complexity of traditional financial planning tools.
In conclusion:
Empower is a powerful tool for those who want a comprehensive view of their finances and are comfortable with a more complex interface. Boldin offers a simplified and user-friendly approach, making it a great option for beginners who want a quick and easy retirement planning solution. Carefully consider your individual needs and preferences before making a decision. You can even try both platforms to see which one resonates with you most. Ultimately, the best tool is the one you’ll actually use to achieve your retirement goals.
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I tried Empower's free version. I dropped it because it didn't track TSP funds. Is this still the case?
Have you used Income Lab
I just started with Boldin and I thinks is horrible for what it says it is. It is easy to set up, but very basic. No cap gains, reduction of income, etc. there are so many free plans I don’t get why anyone would pay. Oh and the biggest drawback is as their website states there is no personal support, only via web chat which is ai and sucks.
I use Wealthtrace, like it.
Tried ProjectionLab? I use it, pretty slick.
I use iBank (like Quicken) to manage my spending, budgeting and net worth tracking. Fidelity has great tools to manage all of my investments and performance. I use Boldin for forward looking planning. I am intrigued by what Empower has to offer.
Boldin is not able to handle accounts with mixed Roth and Pre-tax contributions. The Roth conversions calculator is also very clunky and allows you to model scenarios, but does not actually assist you in identify the best strategy. Empower is able to delineate Roth and Pre-tax contributions and is the best tool I've found for this, but does not offer a Roth conversions calculator. It seems like there is yet to be a tool that is the best of all.
During your review, did you have trouble maintaining connections to financial institutions? I have many accounts across multiple institutions. Boldin claims they update twice per day, but I have multiple accounts that haven't been updated for 10+ days. Every time I login, at least one connection has to be updated. Supports "help" is to delete and try one of the other aggregators. The use Plain, MX, and Finicity. I've tried all three with same results. I can't get them to look at their error logs and tell me why my connections aren't stable.
I've been working on this for 2 months now.
Compare to Monarch Money. Been using about 5 months. Connected to ALL the same institutions and accounts. I never have a connection even a day old. They use the same three aggregators. They measure in hours. Their transactions have to be more complex. Boldin just has to update the account balance. Monarch has to update the balance, and every transaction (payee, account, category, amount, etc.)
PLEASE make everyone aware of these problems. Makes Boldin unusable. Am wondering if I'm the exception or rule.
What experience are others having with Boldin vis-a-vis connections?
Mike
I was an Empower customer for 5’ish years. I found the investment method (holding the S&P manually to ‘better’ support taxes) to not be an improvement over holding low cost indexes without the fees. Fees with empower were just too high. (I don’t consider empower free with that hard sales push)
I like Boldin but its learning curve is reasonably steep, IMO. I have been a subscriber for a few years. I, currently, manually add my info as it cannot break out ROTH from pre-tax in my 401k (Fidelity doesn’t share the split) and this really breaks my long-term plan results. Bolden is far better than my manual tracking.
Do any of these Paid services ever run deals? $12/mo or $120 yearly, for example?
These are good basic programs. For those of you who have some decent excel knowledge, you can create your own excel workbook based on all the data you enter into these programs. Copy and paste your workbook into Chat GPT o3. AI will analyze your data, and provide you with whatever information you need. Just tell AI what information is important to you. Graphs and charts will be provided. They may not be as pretty as these programs (not yet, but in the future…) My point is, AI will be taking the place of all of these programs.
Boldin markets itself as an easy-to-use retirement planning tool, but the experience can be frustrating. While the $120/year subscription seems affordable, there are a number of limitations and confusing aspects that only become apparent during actual use.
The interface isn’t designed with flexibility for varying financial circumstances, and support responses tend to be vague, generic, and lacking step-by-step guidance.
More concerning is the $200/hour consulting service offered to help “set things up.” This raises the question of whether the support gaps are intentional, creating a funnel toward paid help or affiliated advisors — which defeats the purpose for those looking for an independent, self-managed tool.
If you're considering Boldin, be aware that it may not be as user-friendly as advertised, and getting practical support could come at a much higher cost than the subscription alone.
I have used both, have an Empower retirement acct and Empower is far too limited in capability to use as a retirement planning tool. Boldin is FAR superior software!
Thank you for this content, excellent overview of both products. I have been using Empower for 5 years, largely for expense tracking. I have also used Stock Rover for 3 years for investment performance analysis and aggregation. I have been largely a DIY investor/asset manager over the past 40 years, although I have had approximately 60% of my investments under management for the past 3 years, but have concerns about the fees/performance thus far. I plan to fully retire this year and am researching tools to help with my retirement planning/modeling. This video was really helpful!
Does Boldin make sense for someone 10 years out from retirement?
Have you ever compared Money Guide Pro to Boldin?
FYI, due to recent software changes, BoldIn no longer shows how assests are treated from a tax perspective (e.g., whether it's treated as "ordinary income" or "capital gains“), making it near impossible to make certain that the proper information has been entered and is being used in BoldIn's planning. I'm hoping they'll return the program to its previous functionality, where it was easy to verify that info had been entered correctly just by scanning the entries in the Accounts and Assets > Savings account list.
Empower doesn’t appear to factor in investment growth during retirement withdrawals. When I reviewed the detailed cash flow section, the cash balance remained flat—it only showed income inflows and spending outflows, with no indication of portfolio growth. That seems misleading, especially since most retirement assets remain invested in some combination of stocks, bonds, ETFs, CDs, or money market funds. Without accounting for ongoing investment returns, I find it hard to rely on Empower for accurate retirement planning.
That said, I do appreciate its ability to organize and track all my assets—investments, real estate, and liabilities—in one place in real time. That’s a feature I find genuinely useful.
Personal Capital had scenarios ability, I have used it often. Not sure if it was removed after rebranding to Empower. Hope not, because having scenarios was really useful. Maybe scenarios are now only available in the web browser version and not the app?
How secure is Empower
Does empower has ROTH conversions?
Great overview and good discussion of things to consider. But, why would you use both Boldin and ProjectionLab given their similar functionality unless you're simply doing it for familiarity and to promote them? I've no issue with that, but do you actually rely on one or the other? Empower seems the "go to" tool for tracking and portfolio analysis and pairing with a more robust retirement planner seems wise, but why would you pay for both Boldin and ProjectionLab? If you are genuinely using Boldin, it seems like a lot of extra work to keep them that and ProjectionLab synchronized seeing as how ProjectionLab is all manual entry. Am I missing something? Does ProjectionLab offer something – beyond the interface differences – that make it more useful for retirement planning than Boldin?