Origin: AI Budget and Track

I’ve used the Personal Capital, now Empower dashboard for years but it has gotten progressively worse since Empower purchased Personal Capital. Origin is better with respect to linking, but its support for investments, financial planning, allocation analysis, etc. is very bare bones and leaves a lot to be desired. I would gladly pay $100/year for a product that lets me aggregate all my bank accounts, credit cards and investment accounts, and provides the full suite of financial planning tools that Empower offers. I’d say that Origin does very well with respect to the first part (aggregation), but fairly poorly with respect to the financial planning aspect. For example, there’s no way to categorize investment accounts by taxable status (eg taxable, pre tax or post tax). This doesn’t seem to be taken into account with respect to forecasting. The forecasting tool is bare bones and the methodology appears very incomplete with the assumption of a fixed rate of return for all accounts rather than one based on underlying investments. A lot of investment holdings get incorrectly classified as “mixed” although they’re not, and even mixed funds and ETFs should classify according to their underlying holdings. Etc. I’m hopeful that these investment and planning tools will greatly improve over the next year, but at present I can’t yet recommend Origin as a replacement for Empower.

My experience with Origin has been life-changing: it works twofold to manage budgets and plan long term financial goals. In doing so, it tracks your expenses and does a good job automatically categorizing them, with of course the option to customize categories and most anything else you want. It also keeps track of your various accounts and investments all in one spot. Plus, you can manage yourself and your partner with individual views or a combined view. The user interface and overall theme and look of the app are top notch. And customer service, I must say, has been amazing. They clearly want you to feel like you’re taken care of. You also get in-app access to a surprisingly good high-yield money account that I have been using and loving, investment options, and a whole lot of rapidly expanding AI features to help you make the best decisions tailored to your individual financial status. I’m saving so much more money using this app it’s ridiculous. Easy five stars, and I can’t wait to see what they do next to keep improving things even more.

I’ve used Mint and Personal Capital in the past, but was always left frustrated with the design and capabilities. As someone in tech who is heavily comped in pre-IPO stock, the equity feature is great and allows me to see the full picture of my finances without logging into my employee stock admin account. I also am impressed by the account sharing features, which allows my spouse to have her own log in credentials, but with full access to all our shared accounts. I’ve only scratched the surface with the budgeting functionality, but so far it’s been good. I’m sure additional features and usability will come, and my only complaints so far are small (more emojis and ability to add notes to transactions would be great). There are other features like estate planning and investing that also provide real value, and my one experience with customer support (via chat with a live human) was exceptional. Any doubt I had about Origin being worth the subscription price is long gone, and I’m confident I’ll be a religious user for a long time to come. Well done!