Empower/Personal Capital Aggregation

[rkser]

I have been using this site to aggregate my Banking & Credit Cards & all of a sudden it asks me to get a new password & has stopped
me from accessing their site.

Personal Capital was a very popular site, it was bought over by Empower & now it has stopped me to access it. I had a few years of transaction history to monitor my several accounts.

I wonder if anyone else is/has faced this problem.

 

[NgineER]

Still works for me. You are clicking the log into dashboard button right?

 

[rkser]

The site will not let me to log in.

 

[Lawrencewendall]

I'm still in mine several times a day. When it glitches on me, I go to personalcapital.com and do login from start (email address then password)

 

[RonBoyd]

I only login about once a month but seem to recall that when the switch was made, I had to reset my login in stuff -- although it is the same as before.

The only issues I have had is that the App drops connection to some financial institutions each time -- mainly my bank and E*Trade. So I have to go through the "fix" procedure before the data is completely updated.

In any event, I have had no problems accessing my account. (As I did minutes ago.)

 

[BlueberryPie]

Every few months one of my accounts stops working with aggregation at Personal Capital/Empower, they usually get fixed but sometimes with some side effects like it sees it as a new account and it loses the history.
Only half of my Fidelity accounts sync properly, I need to maintain one of them manually and another one is showing a "phantom" amount.

The technology is just not great, I still find it generally useful, so I put up with the problems. Lately Fidelity's aggregation system has been more reliable but doesn't provide as much info as Empower.

 

[Toocold]

I used to use it but it stopped working once banks started using 2FA. Now, I use it for a proxy (no links but manually entered values) just to track net worth trends.

I used to like it for budget breakdown. Is this working for others?

 

[RonBoyd]

I used to use it but it stopped working once banks started using 2FA.

My bank (BMO formerly Bank of the West) uses Two-factor authentication and I have not had any issue connecting... other than my above mentioning that I have to re-authenticate quite often.

 

[BlueberryPie]

Linking to my credit cards has been more solid than retirements accounts and since I put almost everything on my credit card, it's been doing a good job at keeping track of my monthly spend and expense breakdown.

 

[USGrant1962]

I used to use it but it stopped working once banks started using 2FA. Now, I use it for a proxy (no links but manually entered values) just to track net worth trends.

I used to like it for budget breakdown. Is this working for others?

TFA works fine on PC/Empower. Occasionally you have to reconnect but not too often.

Since Empower bought it there are two noticeable quirks. The first is that its categorization of transactions has gotten worse. It used to report Costco Gas as gas/fuel, and Costco as groceries. Now it no longer separates charges at the gas station from the store, and calls them both "rewards", which is not even an expense - it is income. It also now reports DW's hobby job income as consulting, where it formerly correctly categorized it as wages. So I have to change those when they come in.

Second is that it regularly reports that accounts need to be fixed, when in fact they are updating regularly overnight. The worst offender is my 401(k), which is with Empower Retirement

But, aside from a few glitches it works pretty well to track your cash flow and investments all in one place. I take a few minutes once every week or two to review cash flow and fix a few transactions (e.g., it thinks the liquor store is groceries - I made a separate category for booze ). With data now going back to 2018 I can see that my forecasts for semi-retirement spending were on target.

Pro tip - you can manually enter dates in the From box. It took me a couple of years to figure that out, I previously thought you could only see one year back but it will display many years. Good for looking at average spend over time.

 

[BlueberryPie]

Funny Costco has not been showing rewards for me, but anything paid at the register shows as Groceries, and anything paid at the self checkout shows up as "gas station". So some manual adjustment is needed.

My biggest gripe with auto-catgeories is that I once bought groceries for a work party and marked that as expense reimbursement and since the it often default my new groceries purchase to expense reimbursement. I wish there was some for of "just this once/always" tag when you manually change categories.

I do think the tool is pretty easy for year over year budget tracking to forecast future retirement needs. And yes you can manually enter start/end dates, so at the end of every year I not only export the year's data to make a pretty graph in excel, but I also export the last several years to get an average.

BTW in my spreadsheet I also add the insurance premiums shown on my last paycheck of the year since they don't show up in the personal capital summary.

 

[rkser]

Fortunately I could get it fixed & can Log in now.

Thanks everybody !