Investors should exercise extreme caution regarding Empower’s "My Total Retirement" and "Personal Strategy" services. While the marketing promises sophisticated, personalized wealth management, the operational reality is a rigid, unresponsive system that systematically prioritizes fee extraction over performance.First, the service exhibits dangerous inflexibility. The algorithms responsible for protecting your capital often operate on rigid, calendar-based schedules—such as quarterly updates or "birthday" triggers—rather than responding dynamically to market volatility. When the market crashes, the system can sit idle for weeks, and manual intervention requests are frequently delayed by bureaucratic latency, locking in avoidable losses.Second, the proprietary "Smart Weighting" methodology is structurally flawed for modern markets. By arbitrarily betting against the market’s biggest winners (like major tech companies) to enforce an "equal weight" across sectors, the strategy consistently lags behind simple S&P 500 index funds during rallies. You are effectively paying a premium to underperform the benchmark.Finally, the service functions as a "roach motel" for your assets. The "Direct Indexing" feature fragments your portfolio into hundreds of individual stock slices. This structure makes it nearly impossible to transfer your account to a lower-cost broker without liquidating the entire portfolio, triggering a massive, immediate capital gains tax bill. You are trapped paying exorbitant advisory fees (up to 0.89%) because the cost of leaving is too high.Verdict: This service is a fee trap that offers lower liquidity and lower returns than a standard index fund. Save your money, avoid the tax lock-in, and manage your own portfolio.
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