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May 1, 2026 • 13 minutes
If you’re comparing Empower (formerly Personal Capital) and Boldin, there are some surface-level similarities: account aggregation, retirement projections, no cost to get started. But the tools are built for different purposes.
Empower tracks your net worth and how your portfolio is performing. Boldin gives you a complete financial plan, addressing every lever, so that you’re on track to the life you want.
Retirement planning is a sequence of connected decisions: when to retire, which accounts to draw from, how to handle taxes, when to claim Social Security. Those decisions affect each other in ways that take real modeling to see.
Both tools appear regularly in roundups of the best retirement calculators. Here’s how Boldin and Empower compare on planning depth, investment tracking, Roth strategy, pricing, and advisor access.
Empower’s Retirement Planner is primarily a portfolio tracker for monitoring investments rather than retirement income planning software. The Boldin Planner delivers a lot of what a human financial planner does: it takes your full retirement picture and shows you how your decisions play out over time.
Empower’s retirement projections show you whether you’re on track in broad terms. Boldin lets you model the specifics: when to claim Social Security, how Roth conversions affect your tax bracket over time, what a different withdrawal sequence does to your portfolio’s longevity.
If you want a clear view of what you own, what it’s worth, and how it’s performing, Empower handles that well. If you want the kind of holistic retirement plan a financial planner would charge $4,000 to build, the Boldin Planner is where to start.
Boldin AI answers plain-language questions using your actual plan data: your accounts, income, assumptions, and projections. Ask what happens if you retire two years early, whether a Roth conversion makes sense at your income level, or how your plan holds up if markets underperform for the first decade of retirement. It responds in context, with analysis of the scenario and the option to apply the changes to your plan after you review and approve them.
Boldin AI is available on all plans. Basic users get up to 5 questions a day; PlannerPlus users get up to 200 per conversation with no limit on conversations. PlannerPlus users can also use Boldin AI to build or update their plan: tell it what changed, like a new account or an updated salary, and it drafts the update for you to review before anything is applied.
PlannerPlus users can also skip data entry altogether by uploading a statement or document to Document Vault (beta). For example, “update my plan based on this statement,” or “look at my tax return and tell me my risks.” Boldin AI reads the figures and proposes the matching updates, still subject to your review before anything saves.
Empower has no AI assistant and no in-app Q&A. Its retirement planner shows whether you’re on track in broad terms; interpreting what that means for a specific decision, like whether to retire two years early, is left to you.
Empower’s Retirement Planner doesn’t function as integrated Roth conversion software. It offers a Roth Conversion Analyzer calculator as a separate tool that doesn’t connect with your accounts and projections. There’s no way to test conversion amounts against your tax brackets, identify low-bracket windows, or see year-by-year tax impact within the context of your full plan.
Boldin’s Roth Conversion Explorer, available on PlannerPlus, lets you test four strategies side by side:
For each one, you see the year-by-year tax cost and how it reshapes your withdrawal plan over time. Boldin projects your marginal rates across future years, so the low-bracket windows show up in context, with the tax cost already attached — often in that stretch between retirement and RMD age where your rate is lower than it will be later.
Getting the timing and the amount right matters, and it shifts based on your specific income picture. That depends on seeing the tax cost in context, which is what Boldin provides.
Investment tracking and fee analysis. Empower is built as a dedicated portfolio and spending tracker. Its Retirement Fee Analyzer combs your holdings for hidden fund costs, and its performance tracking benchmarks your returns against the S&P 500 and other market indices. Boldin’s own Investments feature, on PlannerPlus, covers your allocation across every account, sorted into asset classes and checked against your Risk Tolerance Survey target.
Spending tracking and budgeting. Empower connects credit card accounts and breaks down spending by category. For people who want one dashboard to monitor their portfolio and their budget, that’s genuinely useful. And all of it costs nothing. The wealth management service is optional, available if you have $100,000 or more and want human portfolio management.
If your primary goal is understanding what you own and what it’s costing you, Empower handles that well.
Retirement income, withdrawal, and drawdown strategy. Boldin pulls income, taxes, Social Security timing, healthcare, real estate, debt, pensions, and annuities into one plan. You can model Medicare costs and estimates, map out a withdrawal and drawdown strategy, and run everything across different return assumptions to see how it holds up. Empower has no built-in tool for modeling which accounts to draw from and in what order to manage taxes and longevity risk.
Social Security strategy. Social Security alone has enough variables to justify a dedicated tool. Boldin lets you compare claiming ages, model spousal coordination strategies, and see the long-term dollar impact of waiting versus claiming early, all within the context of your full plan.
Tax strategy and Roth conversion windows. Tax strategy in retirement is where the modeling earns its keep. Boldin projects your marginal rates across future years, which lets you identify low-bracket windows (often between retirement and RMD age) where conversions make sense, with the tax cost attached. Empower doesn’t project marginal rates across future years or identify low-bracket conversion windows. (The full Roth conversion comparison is covered above.)
Medicare and IRMAA planning. Medicare and IRMAA cost modeling is integrated into Boldin’s retirement projections directly. That integration isn’t part of Empower’s retirement planner.
Monte Carlo simulation. Empower’s retirement planner doesn’t run probability-of-success scenarios across thousands of market outcomes. Boldin does — Monte Carlo simulation is available on PlannerPlus.
The Roth and tax gaps in particular are worth understanding before you decide which tool fits your situation.
Both Boldin and Empower connect directly to your financial institutions so you can see your balances and transactions in one place.
For users linking multiple brokerage, bank, and retirement accounts, Boldin’s SOC 2 Type 2 compliance offers additional comfort that the underlying service has been audited end‑to‑end, beyond the encryption and MFA that both tools provide. Boldin uses 256-bit encryption across all data.
Empower’s wealth management involves active portfolio management rather than planning advice. Fees start at 0.89% and step down across brackets: 0.79% on the first $3M for private clients, declining further through $5M and $10M thresholds, with the lowest marginal rate of 0.49% applying only to dollars above $10M. The blended rate you end up paying depends on your total assets across all tiers.
Boldin Advisors charges a flat $3,200 for a comprehensive retirement plan checkup with a CFP® professional, with no assets under management. That runs across two sessions: an initial meeting to go through your plan and goals, then a follow-up to deliver your written report. The scope covers withdrawal sequencing, Roth conversion guidance, portfolio analysis, cash flow planning, and stress testing, with a fiduciary throughout the process.
The two models serve different needs. If you want someone managing your money on an ongoing basis, Empower’s service makes sense to look at. If you want to sit down with a CFP® professional, build a plan, and own the execution yourself, the flat-fee structure is worth understanding.
Empower’s planning and tracking tools are free. Boldin has a free Basic plan that covers the core: income, assets, Social Security, and a long-range projection. PlannerPlus, at $144 a year, adds Monte Carlo simulations, up to 10 scenarios, and side-by-side comparison for deeper modeling work.
Empower handles monitoring well. The Boldin Planner is built for the decisions that monitoring can’t answer.
If your question is “How are my investments doing?” Empower is the right tool. If your question is whether you can retire, when to claim Social Security, and how to sequence withdrawals without a surprise tax bill, that’s what Boldin is built to solve.
The same distinction shows up consistently in third-party coverage. Rob Berger has tested most of the major retirement planning tools available. In his Empower review, he rates it highly for tracking net worth, surfacing hidden investment fees, and pulling your full financial picture into one place. But he names Boldin as his personal choice for planning. “Boldin is what I use to plan our retirement,” he writes at robberger.com, pointing to its depth across Social Security claiming, Roth conversion windows, Medicare costs, and pensions.
At The White Coat Investor, contributor Eric Rosenberg draws the same line: “Modeling scenarios and changing assumptions are its strengths,” he writes of Boldin, while positioning Empower as the better fit for portfolio tracking and investment analysis.
SmartAsset’s Boldin review describes the platform as well-suited to people approaching retirement who want to stress-test their decisions before making major life changes. Their Empower review finds its strongest use case among investors with $200,000 or more who want portfolio management paired with human advisor access.
For retirement planning specifically, Boldin goes much deeper than Empower. It connects Roth conversions, tax sequencing, Social Security timing, and healthcare costs inside one integrated plan, so you can see how those decisions interact. Empower has a retirement planner, but most people use it for investment monitoring. If planning is the goal, Boldin is where to focus.
Empower and Personal Capital are the same platform. Empower acquired Personal Capital in August 2020 and folded it into the Empower brand in February 2023. The free tools (net worth tracking, portfolio analysis, and the retirement planner) carried over under the new name. If you’ve been searching for Personal Capital vs. Boldin comparisons, both names refer to the same product.
Boldin offers a free Basic plan that covers core planning features. PlannerPlus, which adds Monte Carlo simulations, multiple scenarios, and side-by-side comparisons, is $144 per year.
Roth conversion planning involves moving money from a traditional IRA or 401(k) into a Roth account during years when your income and your tax rate are lower than it will be later. The goal is to pay taxes now at a favorable rate rather than in the future, when RMDs or other income sources push you into higher brackets. Done well, it can reduce lifetime taxes and shrink future required minimum distributions.
Boldin AI is built into the Boldin Planner and draws on your actual plan data to answer financial and retirement questions in plain language, as well as update your plan with approval. You can explore scenarios, ask follow-ups, and get links directly to the relevant part of your plan. Basic users get up to 5 questions per day; PlannerPlus users get up to 200 per conversation, with no limit on conversations.
Boldin builds its default assumptions from long-term economic data: an 8.08% rate of return on a moderate portfolio and 2.54% inflation. You can adjust both and switch between optimistic, average, and pessimistic scenarios at any point. PlannerPlus adds Monte Carlo simulation, which runs your plan across thousands of market scenarios and returns a probability-of-success score.
Empower includes basic Roth conversion modeling. Boldin’s Roth Conversion Explorer (a PlannerPlus feature) goes considerably further, letting you maximize estate value, minimize lifetime taxes, convert up to your income tax threshold, and convert up to your IRMAA threshold. You can also use it to see the year-by-year tax impact of each against your full income and withdrawal plan.
Boldin’s Investments feature, available on PlannerPlus, lets you connect accounts or add positions by hand and see your full asset allocation across every account, sorted into 8 asset classes and checked against your Risk Tolerance Survey target. Your account balances already feed the rest of your plan, projecting how your portfolio holds up across different withdrawal strategies, return assumptions, and tax scenarios.
Boldin’s free Basic plan covers income, assets, Social Security, and a long-range projection. PlannerPlus, at $144 a year, adds Monte Carlo simulation, up to 10 scenarios with side-by-side comparison, and expanded Boldin AI access. Anyone working through real retirement decisions (when to claim, how to sequence withdrawals, whether a Roth conversion makes sense) will find real value in the modeling depth in PlannerPlus. A traditional financial planner would charge several thousand dollars to build the same plan.
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