I Linked My Banks To A Free Dashboard

Question for you, what is your net worth right now? Not approximately, not roughly, but today, what's the exact number? Honestly, I couldn't tell you mine. My finances are a bit of a mess. I've got so many different banks, so many different businesses, money all over the place. It's pretty crazy. Day to day, I honestly, sometimes I don't really have much of an idea of what my financial picture is. And that's a problem because you cannot improve what you don't measure. This is like business 101 and I do a pretty good job in business, but for some reason in my personal finances, it's just too complicated and so I don't track it very well. So if that sounds like you and your financial situation, this video is for you, but I set up Empower's free dashboard and I'm going to link an account on camera here just to show you how it works and how it can give you a full financial picture of where you're at. This video is sponsored by Empower Personal Wealth, LLC, and EPW also compensates me for new leads. I'm not an investment client of Empower Advisory Group, LLC. This is Empower's personal dashboard and it's free to sign up and use. So everybody should do this. Go and try this out. But you link your accounts and it pulls your balances and transactions into one place here. So you get a full picture of what's going on. And I'm going to stick to the money tracking side For this particular video, I might do videos in the future. We're just going to focus on net worth, cash flow, and budgeting, but they also have in the free dashboard investment analysis, retirement planning, education planning. There's a lot you can do there. Down the left are the accounts that I've linked in, what I have up top, and then what I owe down below. Here on the dashboard, it lets you track your net worth over time. Again, you can review your portfolio performance if you connect your investments here. It talks about your Your retirement savings has a budgeting section. Talks about your emergency fund and your debt pay down. So there's a lot. You get a full financial picture here. So let's link an account live. I've already got a few of my bank accounts. Comment down below, how many bank accounts do you have? As I was putting this together, I realized I have like nine bank accounts. Is that normal? So you search for your bank and then you just log into it like you do for your online banking. This is a lot easier than it used to be because almost all banks have online banking now. So there it is. It put in my new bank accounts and it pulled in the balance and the transactions all together. So it took about 30 seconds for it to sync once I got it added. I linked some of my other bank accounts before I recorded, so now I get a nice list. Instead of having to go into each app individually, I get just a nice list. Here's your bank accounts, here's where they're at, and it keeps them synced and up to date. So my net worth, that is the number that I couldn't tell you at the start, and that's actually probably your most important financial number. You know, people always think about how much money do I make, but that's kind of irrelevant because you might spend more than you make, and then you're actually in a bad Bad financial situation. So your net worth is actually like your KPI, your key performance indicator of how you're doing financially. And the goal is for over time that net worth to go up, but your net worth is just how much you have minus how much you owe across all of your accounts. When you first connect your accounts, it's going to look pretty normal for it to just kind of spike up to the right like this because you're starting at zero before you connect your accounts and then it goes up drastically once you connect your accounts. So it's kind of the day you connect, that's when your tracking really starts. And this is a number that you should know, and it's a lot more likely that you're going to know it if you don't have to keep track of it and update it yourself. But there's an app that just pulls in all your bank accounts, all your liabilities, and we'll do it for you. And this is just a starting point for you. Okay. Don't be discouraged about where your net worth is. Uh, you might even have a negative net worth. If you owe more than you have in assets, that's fine. That's, that's normal for a lot of people. Uh, but this is just a starting point. And our goal is we're going to have that go up over time. So net worth is important. I also care a lot about cash flow, okay? And in my particular situation, my cash flow is very confusing because I'm getting paid from different income streams. I have a lot of expenses that come out at different times of the month. And my cash flow is just, it's very confusing. But Empower takes all your transactions from the accounts you've connected and it gives you a clear picture. Hey, here's where you're at. Here's where you had money coming in. Here's where you had money going out. And it can compare it to last month too. So you can kind of see if anything looks kind of off. And then this is the budgeting side, which is very handy. It's kind of the same money, but it's sorted by where it went. Because again, two ways you can help your financial situation is you can make more money, Increase your... income you know by doing side hustles or getting a raise or whatever the case might be but you also can improve your financial situation and get your net worth going in the right direction by limiting your expenses and a lot of times people have no idea what they're spending on different things there's no budget at all And again, it's a lot more likely if you have software like this that will take all your transactions and help budget for you. It's a lot more likely that you're going to actually do it. And it tries its best to categorize each transaction, but you can go through and see like Costco was not general merchandise. It was actually groceries. So I'm going to go ahead and save that. I can apply to past transactions. Costco is always groceries, except for when it's something else Costco sells, which is everything. Comment down below if you're a Costco fan. Here is the phone app. If it's on my phone, I'm probably more likely to check it regularly. You can just pull open the app. You can connect accounts on there, see your net worth. It's kind of the same views that you have on the web, but in the app. One thing to keep in mind is this is a tracker. It's not a bookkeeper. So if you run an actual business, this is not meant to replace your accounting software for your LLC. It isn't built for that. I'm using it to see my money, not do my business books. If you were hoping to cancel your bookkeeping app and use this instead, don't do that. and also keep in mind it only knows what you link okay it's not omniscient it can't go out and find things that you didn't connect to it so if you forgot to connect you know a certain credit card or something like that then it's not going to be tracked in the numbers but if you use it like I'm using it here and you connect all of your different credit cards and your different bank accounts you get a nice good clear picture and a nice graphical picture of just where your financial financial situation is. So the short version, if your money is spread out across a bunch of places like mine, you're tracking it by hand or you're not tracking it at all. This is for you. This will help you out. It's free to sign up and use. So I think it's a no brainer. Link will be down below. But if you feel like you already have a good grasp on, you know, how much money you have and where it's at, or maybe you only have one bank, I think some I think that's how people used to do it is you had one bank and everything was there. This still might even be useful, though, for just giving you kind of a graphical picture of, you know, how your net worth has changed over time or helping you with your budgeting. Link is in the description. Thank you guys so much for watching. God bless you all and have a great rest of your day.