Empower vs SoFi Coach: Budgeting Comparison Guide

What Is SoFi Coach

SoFi Coach is an AI-powered money tracker. You can easily connect all of your accounts (including non-SoFi accounts) to get a thorough understanding of your financial picture. This includes bank and investment accounts, as well as credit cards and loans. Want to understand your net worth? You can add in any real estate you own, too.

Some of the most common budgeting mistakes happen because people don’t fully account for all of their spending and keep an eye on recurring monthly payments. SoFi Coach lays out everything so users can get a bird’s-eye view of their monthly expenses. With all of your information in one view, you can quickly sort transactions with spending categories, and stay on top of upcoming bills.

SoFi Coach is free for everyone, and it also comes with credit monitoring and an AI guide that can answer your questions about saving, retirement planning, debt payoff strategies, and more. If you’ve been trying to figure out how to make a budget, you may find chatting with SoFi coach can help you knock that off your to-do list.

Benefits of SoFi Coach

With so many features, there are many benefits to using SoFi Coach as an online budget planner. One is the AI-enabled SoFi Coach Chat. It’s handy for just about all budgeting questions. From determining needs vs wants, understanding key investment concepts, grasping the different types of budgeting methods, to insights into how much you could truly save or put toward debt each month, the AI assistant can help provide guidance. Overall, SoFi Coach is a useful central hub for all of your financial activity.

What Is Empower?

Empower is a financial-services company, and its suite of tools includes a financial management platform that enables users to link up their deposit and investment accounts along with their debt accounts and make them all visible in one dashboard. The platform includes a budget planner, net worth tracker, as well as portfolio analysis and Empower retirement-planning functions.

It’s free, and isn’t just for tracking spending. Empower can help users plan for retirement, understand their net worth, and provide insight into how to allocate their investments.

Benefits of Empower

The biggest benefit to using Empower is that it’s a free financial central hub for all of your accounts. As with SoFi Coach, it’s easy to use Empower to quickly assess your total financial situation and use that information to determine your next steps.

Plus, with Empower retirement-planning tools, you can model different saving and spending scenarios to see how they would likely affect your financial future. Change different variables, such as retirement age and savings contributions, to see how those tweaks would alter your golden years.

SoFi Coach vs Empower for Budgeting

Feature	SoFi Coach	Empower
Pricing	Free	Free
Credit monitoring	VantageScore 3.0 credit score included	Does not offer credit monitoring
Investment tools	AI guide trained on the same tools SoFi financial planners use	Analyzes portfolio and offers allocation recommendations. Personal Strategy® advisory services are available for those with more than $250,000 invested with Empower.
Customized insights	Coach insights provide visual depictions of your finances. AI-powered Coach Chat offers personalized guidance on budgeting, saving, retirement, and investing based on your numbers.	Dashboard insights based on linked accounts become more useful as you add more accounts. No AI advisor. Human advisors may reach out to users to market Empower financial products.

SoFi Coach Advantages

There are more than a few advantages to using SoFi Coach for planning and budgeting. A major benefit is that you can pair it up with over 12,000 banks, credit unions, and financial institutions.

Another perk is that SoFi Coach will monitor your VantageScore 3.0 for free, updating once a week. Better yet? Its continuous monitoring won’t affect your credit score in any way. And if you’re on a journey to improve your score, you can simply ask your AI coach for advice to improve your score. “Your credit score is based on factors such as how often you pay your bills on time, how many loans and credit cards you have, what your debt is relative to your credit limits, and the average age of your accounts,” says Brian Walsh, CFP^® and Head of Advice & Planning at SoFi.

Tips to Maximize SoFi Coach Benefits

Because SoFi Coach works better the more it understands your complete financial situation, it helps to connect all of your accounts to maximize the app. This includes deposit accounts, assets, and debts such as credit cards and loans. With all of your information included, the AI can fully analyze your situation and give you actionable advice.

If you’ve ever used a free monthly budget template to gain a better understanding of your finances, you know how helpful budgeting can be. With AI behind the data, the experience can be even more powerful because you can have a dialogue about your situation and gain a more intimate understanding of your finances.

Keep in mind the AI can’t tell you what specifically to invest your money in, but it can tell you how much you should aim to set aside each month. Additionally, SoFi Coach can also help users take simple actions with SoFi bank accounts, making it even easier to transfer between SoFi accounts or move money into vaults for specific savings goals.

The Takeaway

Few people have fun budgeting and creating a strong financial plan. Most people tend to drag their feet and put it off for as long as possible. With SoFi Coach, not only is the process easy and straightforward, AI tools make it easy to develop personalized financial strategies tailored for your goals.

Take control of your finances with SoFi Coach. You can easily view all of your accounts in one convenient dashboard: bank and investment balances, current debts, spending breakdowns, and credit score. Easily set up budgets and spot upcoming bills. And get personalized insights on everyday money questions and take action with Coach chat, the AI guide that’s powered by the playbooks of SoFi Financial Planners, so its guidance comes from expert knowledge.

Meet SoFi Coach, your smart personal guide to getting your money right.

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