01 · Side by side
FIYR vs Empower at a glance
| Feature | FIYR | Empower |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $8/month, or $76.80/year ($6.40/month). One plan with every feature. | The dashboard and financial tools are completely free. Empower earns through a separate paid wealth-management service charged as a percentage of assets. |
| Free trial | 30 days with every feature. No charge until the trial ends. | None needed: the dashboard is free, not trial-gated. |
| Platforms | Web app for desktop and mobile browsers. | iPhone, Android and web. No desktop app. |
| Budgeting style | Monthly category budgets, with reusable budget templates. | A basic budgeting and cash-flow tool; reviewers consistently call it light. |
| Bank sync | Plaid. Manual accounts and transactions too. | Links your accounts to aggregate net worth and spending. |
| Net worth | Yes: linked accounts plus manual assets (home, vehicles, crypto) and debts. | Yes: a flagship feature, with net worth tracked over time. |
| FIRE / retirement projection | Yes, on every plan: your FIRE date with Monte Carlo odds, side-by-side scenarios, taxes by account type and life events, from your real spending and balances. | A free Retirement Planner with Monte Carlo: 5,000 scenarios, scored as a low, medium or high probability of success. |
| Investments | Investment account balances through Plaid. No per-holding performance view. | Strong: portfolio analysis with allocation, risk and holdings — more detailed than FIYR. |
| Shared / household | One login per account. Transactions can be tagged as yours, your partner’s or shared. | Single-user dashboard; no separate household logins. |
| Import & export | CSV export of transactions. CSV import with column and category mapping. Imports a full ProjectionLab plan as a scenario. | CSV import and export are not documented on its tool pages. |
02 · Why switch
Why people look for a Empower alternative
Empower’s dashboard is free and genuinely capable, so the reasons to look elsewhere are about how it makes money and where it goes deep:
You don’t want a sales funnel attached to your data
Empower’s free tools exist to pitch its paid wealth-management service, and the most common complaint is repeated calls from advisors after you sign up. FIYR is a straightforward paid app with no advisory arm and nothing to upsell; you pay $8 a month and that is the product.
You want explicit odds and deeper modeling
Empower’s Retirement Planner runs Monte Carlo and scores your plan low, medium or high. FIYR surfaces an explicit probability-of-success percentage and lets you compare scenarios side by side and model taxes by account type, from your real balances.
You want real budgeting
Empower’s budgeting is widely described as basic. FIYR has monthly category budgets with reusable templates and automatic rules, so day-to-day spending is a first-class part of the app, not an afterthought.
03 · The honest part
When Empower is the better choice
Empower’s Personal Dashboard is a strong, free product, and for a lot of people it is the better choice. Pick Empower if:
- You want it free. Empower’s dashboard and tools are completely free: net worth, spending, investment tracking and the Retirement Planner, at no cost. FIYR is a paid app at $8 a month or $76.80 a year after a 30-day trial.
- You want a free Monte Carlo retirement planner. Empower’s Retirement Planner runs a Monte Carlo simulation over thousands of scenarios and scores your plan’s probability of success, at no charge. FIYR includes Monte Carlo odds too, but as part of a paid plan.
- You track investments in depth. Empower’s portfolio analysis covers allocation, risk and holdings, and reviewers praise its investment tools. FIYR tracks investment account balances and uses them in your net worth and FIRE date, without that per-holding depth.
- You want an established, large-scale brand. Empower’s dashboard has run since its Personal Capital days in 2009, with a long track record. FIYR is a newer, focused tool.
04 · Moving over
How to switch from Empower to FIYR
Empower’s dashboard does not document a CSV export on its tool pages, so check it before counting on moving history. Either way, linking your accounts to FIYR brings recent transactions over on their own.
- Export your data from Empower, if you can. Empower does not document a CSV export on its tool pages, so open the dashboard and look for a transaction download first. If you can get a CSV file, that is the one FIYR imports; if not, your linked accounts still bring recent history.
- Start a FIYR trial and link your accounts. Accounts connect through Plaid. FIYR asks for up to two years of transaction history; how much arrives depends on your bank.
- Import only the older history. In Transactions, open the ⋯ menu and choose Import CSV. Map the date, name, amount and category columns, then match each old category to a FIYR one. Trim the file to dates before your linked history starts, or the overlap will show up twice. Amounts must be plain numbers, and FIYR treats positive amounts as spending and negative amounts as money coming in, so flip the sign on a column that uses the opposite convention.
- Set up categories and rules. Rules recategorize new transactions automatically, so the cleanup you do once keeps paying off.
- Add what Plaid can’t see. Enter your home, vehicles, crypto and any loans as manual assets and liabilities so your net worth is complete. Then open the FIRE view to see the date your real numbers point to.
Empower is free, so you may want to keep it open for its investment analytics while you use FIYR for budgeting, net worth and your FIRE date. Nothing stops you running both.
05 · Keep reading