Empower vs Retirement Scenario Explorer

What Empower does best

Empower (formerly Personal Capital) does one thing no manual planning tool can match: it connects to your actual accounts. Your 401(k), your brokerage, your bank, your spouse’s IRA — all aggregated into one live net-worth picture that updates itself. Layered on top of that are a Retirement Planner with Monte Carlo simulation and a recession simulator, a fee analyzer that surfaces the expense ratios quietly eating your 401(k), and a cash-flow view. All of it costs nothing.

It is, without qualification, one of the most useful free financial tools available. If your accounts are scattered across five institutions and you’ve never seen them added up in one place, that alone is worth the signup.

What the free tool actually costs

Empower is a wealth-management firm. The dashboard is free because it is the top of their funnel — and they are open about that. Three things follow from it, and none of them are hidden:

• You create an account and link real financial credentials. Your balances are aggregated and stored on their systems. That’s the price of the accuracy.
• If your linked assets are substantial, you will hear from an advisor. This is the deal, disclosed at signup. Some people find the call genuinely useful. Some find it unwelcome. Both reactions are reasonable — but the second group should know it’s coming.
• The planner is a lead-in to the advisory service. That doesn’t make its math wrong. It does mean the tool’s job is not finished when you have your answer.

A free tool that wants your assets under management isn’t a scam. It’s just a different transaction than the one it looks like.

The 0.89% question

Empower’s Personal Strategy advisory service starts at a $100,000 investable-asset minimum and charges 0.89% per year on the first $1 million, tiering down to 0.79%, 0.69%, 0.59% and 0.49% at higher asset levels. On a $1 million portfolio that is roughly $8,900 a year — about $89,000 over a decade, before counting the growth those fees also come out of.

To be fair to them: that is below the traditional 1% advisory norm, their advisors are fiduciaries, and managed money genuinely earns its keep for some people — someone to call in a crash is worth more than most spreadsheets admit. The point isn’t that 0.89% is expensive relative to peers. It’s that the decision to hand over a percentage of everything, every year, forever, deserves to be made deliberately — not arrived at because you wanted a retirement calculator and this is where the calculator led. If you want to see that comparison drawn out properly, we wrote a full piece on advisors versus software.

Where the modeling differs

Empower’s planner is strong on the big picture: will the money last, what does a recession do to it, what happens if you retire two years earlier. Where it stops is the tax-and-timing layer — the decisions that sit between 55 and 70 and quietly move six figures:

And one structural difference worth stating plainly: we don’t hold your money. There is no assets-under-management business here, no advisor waiting on the other end of your balance. The software is the entire product, which means we have nothing to sell you except the software.

Head to head

Based on each product’s public documentation and pricing pages, verified July 2026. If we’ve mischaracterized anything, tell us and we’ll correct it.

Use both, honestly

This isn’t an either/or, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Empower’s aggregation answers “what do I actually have?” better than anything you’d assemble by hand. Take those totals — the ones you now know are right — and run them here to answer “what do I do with it, and when?” That second question is where the tax layer lives, and it’s the one we built for.

If you’d rather not link anything at all, the free tier here runs the complete simulation engine with no account and no email — your plan never leaves your browser.

Common questions