Cancel Empower / Personal Capital. Track Net Worth Without the Sales Calls.

The phone call that made me cancel

I signed up for Personal Capital — now Empower — back in 2019 because their dashboard was the prettiest net worth tracker on the market and it was free. I connected my brokerage, my IRA, my checking account. The chart was beautiful. The fee analyzer flagged some 401k expense ratios I'd missed. Genuinely useful.

Then the calls started.

About six weeks in, I got a call from a "wealth advisor" at Empower. They'd "noticed" I had a portfolio above their managed-advisory threshold (then $100k, now varies) and wanted to schedule a 30-minute consultation about whether their managed-advisory service might be a fit. I declined politely. They called again two months later. Then again. Different advisors, same script.

Eventually I realized: I wasn't a customer of Empower's net worth dashboard. I was a lead they were qualifying through my account balances. The "free" service was the lead-magnet for their wealth advisory business, which charges 0.49–0.89% of assets under management annually. On a $500k portfolio, that's $2,450–$4,450/year — every year, forever.

I disconnected my accounts. Their persistent calls were the catalyst, but the real issue was the business model: I'd handed a wealth advisory company a complete real-time view of my finances in exchange for a chart. That's not free.

The "you are the product" problem

Most personal finance apps charge you. Monarch is $15/mo. YNAB is $15/mo. Sharesight is $19/mo. You're the customer; they're the vendor.

Empower is "free" because their actual product is wealth advisory services. The dashboard exists to identify qualified leads — people with enough investable assets that the advisory revenue justifies the engineering cost of the app. Your account balances are the qualification mechanism. Your contact info, which you provided at signup, is the lead capture. The phone calls are the sales motion.

This isn't hidden — it's in Empower's marketing. They're proud of their advisory service. The honest framing is: the dashboard is a free trial of being marketed to.

For some people, that trade is acceptable. If you actually want a wealth advisor and would benefit from one, Empower is a reasonable on-ramp. For everyone else — most people, statistically — you're paying with your data and your phone for a chart you could render yourself.

What Empower's net worth dashboard actually does

Setting aside the lead-gen layer, the actual software does three things:

1. Aggregates account balances via Plaid (and partner APIs for some brokerages).
2. Charts net worth over time — that's the famous "line going up" chart.
3. Surfaces fee analysis on 401k holdings — flags high-expense-ratio funds you might want to swap.

The first two are what the dashboard is for. Both are spreadsheet math — same as the Monarch case. The third (fee analyzer) is a one-time exercise: download your 401k holdings once, look up the expense ratios on Morningstar (free), make the rebalance call. You don't need an ongoing app to do this.

The Excel workbook that replaces Empower's net worth tracking

The gridmoo Net Worth Tracker covers it. Same architecture as the Monarch replacement (we wrote about that in depth here):

• Monthly Snapshots — long-format ledger, one row per (account × month). Eleven sample accounts pre-populated.
• Accounts Setup — define each account once.
• Net Worth Dashboard — Current Net Worth, Total Assets, Total Debts, Asset:Debt Ratio. Computes via SUMIFS against MAX(snapshot_date) so the dashboard always reflects your latest month.
• Settings & Targets — your net worth target and threshold for large-change alerts.
• Print Reports — one-page PDF for year-end review.

See the Net Worth Tracker — $11 once.
→ See the workbook

How it works (and the cadence is the point)

1. Five minutes of one-time setup: list every account you want included in the Accounts Setup tab.
2. Last day of each month: type the current balance for each account into Monthly Snapshots. Takes ~2 minutes if you have your accounts open in browser tabs.
3. Glance at the Net Worth Dashboard. Done for the month.

This is the right cadence for net worth. Net worth is a slow number. Day-to-day fluctuation is noise — your 401k balance changing by 0.3% because the market is jittery doesn't change anything you'll do this week. The monthly snapshot removes the noise and shows you the trend.

What you actually lose by switching

• Automatic balance updates. You log balances manually once a month. Five minutes total.
• The fee analyzer. Do this once with Morningstar (free) or your 401k provider's fund list. It's a one-time exercise, not an ongoing app feature.
• The polished UI. The spreadsheet is clean, not luxurious. If you're paying with your phone number for "luxurious," that's a real preference.
• The retirement projection tool. The workbook tracks current net worth; it doesn't model "what if I retire at 55." Build a separate projection in the workbook or use a free FIRE calculator like networthify or NerdWallet.

You also lose the phone calls. That's a feature.

The case for owning your data

• Your account balances stay private. No Plaid integration. No advisory company evaluating your portfolio size. No phone calls qualifying you as a lead.
• The file is yours. Empower could change pricing, sunset the free tier, get acquired, or fold the dashboard into a paid advisory product. The spreadsheet sits on your machine indefinitely.
• You stop being a lead. The minute you disconnect your accounts and uninstall the app, the calls stop.
• You can audit every formula. Click the cell, read the math.

The decision

If you actually want to evaluate a wealth advisor and you'd benefit from the conversation, Empower is a reasonable lead-gen funnel — and the phone calls are then a feature, not a bug. For everyone else, the trade is unfavorable: you give a wealth advisory company a real-time view of your finances in exchange for a chart you can render yourself.

You can get the Net Worth Tracker for $11. Or browse the full catalog for other Excel workbooks that replace specific SaaS subscriptions.

Want to see the workbook shape before you buy? Download the free Daily Budget Planner — same architecture, no card required.

And if you want to see what your full personal finance SaaS stack costs per year, run the SaaS Tax Calculator — even free tools have a cost, and Empower's is paid in phone calls.