Empower Retirement
Sucks at investing
Auto enrolled into this shit-stain of an Empower Retirement through my internship. Despite opting out, they put me back in when it came time to process the first payment.
These assholes took about $130 off my paycheck and refused to give it back until 2 months after it “vested” (that or some other bullshit–regardless, it was way too long for what amounted to a refund).
Once it came to that time, I was given a few other reasons to delay my payment.
I can’t remember what for, as it was three months ago, and those reasons basically amounted to them being a bureaucratic hellscape.
But finally, I got them to start the refund–only after realizing, to my horror, that they “invested it.”
In the month they played it in the stock market, my $130 shrank to about $100—a loss.
I want to point out that this is the longest bull economy in our nation’s history. How in the economic fuck did they pull that off?
Naturally, they took a fee for the refund, and then I incurred a $19 tax for the early withdrawal of my 401k.
The auto-enroll payment that should have never went through occurred in August 2018.
It is now February 2019, and I am looking at a $77 check from Empower.
While I figure getting that back is better than forgetting about the account forever, I’m still pissed that we live in a world where companies like this exist.
tl;dr: Anti-consumer. Bureaucratic. It sucks at investing. They all probably eat babies.
Don't use this company.
Don’t use this company. They don’t make it easy to do rollovers and they like to charge fees they can’t explain for doing a rollover.
Letter referring to a non-existent retirement plan I supposedly own
I received a letter from Empower Retirement stating “Please read this notification carefully to understand the upcoming investment option changes to your plan…’TP USA 4-01(k) Plan has directed Empower Retirement to complete some updates regarding the investment option(s) in your plan.” At the end of the letter I am urged to make changes by “Visiting your plan’s Website at empowermyretirement.com.” Or “Contacting a representative… at 1-800-338-4015.”
I am assuming that this is a scam to either get personal information from the recipient (by the way, my name was misspelled on the letter), or to have the recipient contact the company and get a sales pitch. Certainly, senior citizens who are impaired are the target of this scam. I hope this information will alert others not to fall for this #@#!
He did not know they are a monthly contracte
He did not know they are a monthly contracted credit. Not only did he not know what RS credits are, he tried to tell me if I clicked the blue hyperlink for the transaction’s confirmation number
I would see what fund the RS credit came from (my complaint is they do not identify which funds get which amount of RS credit each month that is listed in Transactions and that the total is added to whatever fund(s) a participant contributes to instead of going back into the fund that received the RS credit). When he tried on his end, he realized I was correct.
I was annoyed that someone would call and give me false explanations. Do they think participants are so stupid? I felt he was patronizing and condescending.
Bad Service Provide
As an update, regarding Empower’s posting of Revenue Sharing credits. Apparently Empower lies about its accounting practices or they think customers are too stupid to notice. We have 6 funds receiving RS credits, 4 funds do not.
The total, about $26/month, had been added to the fund we contribute to. We received a letter in late June from a Lead Regulatory Correspondent stating Empower was enhancing their record keeping platform and would soon be posting RS credits to the fund that produced them.
I will be removing the rest of my assets.
They are still blaming Chase, and this is out of their hands although I was misled by empower and I’m in this position because of Empower. They are a bunch of liars and as soon as I find another investment company, I will be removing the rest of my assets.
Horrible retirement service.
Horrible retirement service. No help what so ever.
Scammer
The fee was contrary to our Plan Document, the employer pays the fee; Empower had neglected to include this in their system. This was supposed to be fixed in Nov — until my sister retired from the same company and rolled over her account to another company in June.
Empower still charged her the $50 fee, Seriously!? Did the CSR even check the employer’s Plan Document? Why did the fee even appear in the system to charge the Participant if the issue was fixed in Empower’s system? She had to go through the employer’s Plan Admin to get her fee back.
Very rude!
They need to assign each call an ID number so if a participant has to call back, the CSR can look up the call. Empower needs to update their processes so if someone requests a withdrawal,
it doesn’t take 2 weeks to get to them. Empower seems to intentionally make everything difficult for Participants…..unless you are putting money into their coffers.
They made a couple mistakes when my husband’s company transferred to Empower and finally put the money in the correct sources. I would have filed ERISA & FINRA complaints had they not. Calling CSRs would have gotten us nowhere.
I went through the VP/Participant Services so it isn’t easy to contact anyone who can actually make something happen. Be a squeaky wheel. We ended up working with a couple nice people but in the end, complaints went nowhere.
Never Again
Empower informed me despite having asked for all of Schwab’s account information they could not send the checks directly to Schwab, would need to confirm my address with Experian and then could reissue the checks 15 days later.
When I asked why this process hadn’t been explained to me when I made the initial request, the representative became rude and started over enunciating her words to be “clear”.
It’s infuriating that I have had to manage so much of this poorly executed transfer. I pay you to not have to babysit these accounts. This process has done nothing but made me more thankful I no longer have to deal with your company.
Scammer
They charged me $30 a quarter to maintain an employer based account – I spent more on this company in one year than I could hope to make in interest in years.
When I left that company and tried to roll over the accounts, they pushed me to open an IRA with them before finally agreeing to roll over the money to my existing IRA.
They issued the check to Charles Schwab, but sent it to a random address rather than sending it to Schwab. When after two months the money had still not gone through to Schwab, I reached out to them and realized this error.
Horrible customer service.
Horrible customer service. I have been disconnected, told different things from different people, rude and they do not want to HELP.
Everytime I try to login to their site it seems to be under maintenance on a weekend.
They dont have personal rate of return or I think they took it away so it makes it impossible to see how your investments are doing. Seems like nobody complained.
Every other retirement investment manager has this personal rate of return for year. Everytime I try to login to their site it seems to be under maintenance on a weekend.
I could given zero rating.
Heft fee structure for all the funds and low performance. They charged me even after I withdrew all my money. Wish I could given zero rating.
They are incompetent.
What a joke! We’ve been advised by our attorney and broker to write a ‘written’ complaint, which they are required to report to the SEC. We will also file a complaint through the SEC website.
It’s quite a bit to report, from them saying they didn’t receive our faxes, said the PDF file was all blank pages, to the incorrect way they handled the in-kind transfer. They are incompetent.
Never Again
Empower says they make Q updates to their participant website but the changes are not particularly helpful. The last update caused the table format to be deleted so to save anything to my computer, I have to change the “print” setting to “save” and save as a PDF. To copy & paste,
I have to “paste special”. An “update” in January was an annual contribution section on their home page. I noticed they had left out the contribution for January 4th pay day (pay period ending Dec 31). I pointed this out and an IT associate stated income, contributions, etc were included in the year they were earned, not when paid.