Here's the breakdown of everything that you need to know if you have a retirement account with
Empower. Whether it be a 401k or 457b or 403b this video is going to show you what you need to know
and how to use their website. The first thing you do is go to empower.com and if you never logged
in before you're going to have to register an account. Do that by hitting one of the red login
buttons and come down here to the green register button. When you hit that you're going to have to
plug in your social, zip code and last name, date of birth... follow the steps and you will register
to an account and then you can log in from there. If you've already logged in before to your empower
account then just type in your username and password and hit sign in. Every time that you log
in just for enhanced security it's going to have to text or call you or email you a code to log in.
Once you get the code just go ahead and plug it into the box and hit sign in. It's always going to
log you on to this first page here and this is the home page . So there's a lot of big numbers here
that may catch your eye, don't pay any attention to it. It just asks you to plug in what you think
you're going to make in retirement or what you want to make and then it tries to calculate it for
you but it's not always as accurate if you have social security or pension or other investment
options. Every retirement website is going to have some sort of retirement calculators just
so they can advertise it's an extra tool that they have. So the big number on your left is going to
be how much money you have in the account right now. Up top on these four tabs here if we click
account and then we go to overview so it's going to bring you to this page right here and all the
options that were up top are also going to be down here on the side there the same thing.
The balance is the same thing as your net worth, the 2022 contributions is going to show you here
how much that you're contributing right now per paycheck, not per month, per paycheck so you can
either set a dollar amount or a percentage of your paycheck and it'll show you how much that you've
contributed up to this year and then it's going to show you your top Investments. So what is the
breakdown that you're invested in right now. So 37% of my money is in this fund 35% is this one,
27% in the Vanguard small cap. And all the way down it's just going to have the transaction
history with your contributions, any fees that were assessed or any dividends that you've earned.
Okay if we click on the rate of return button on the left hand side here this is a calculator
that you can use to set any date period you want and it will show you your rate of return. So for
example I just did year to date down 21.77%, you can set it to do one year so from October 20th
of 2021 until right now October 20th of 2022 down 21%. If you want to mess around with that and see
the rates of return for your total portfolio that's how you do that. You come over to the
beneficiaries tab here, this is super important make sure you have a beneficiary! At least one
in the account so that if you were to pass away or something were to happen it's easy for them
to get the money. So for my beneficiaries I have two people and then split 50% and 50% allocation.
If you just have one like you have a wife or a husband you can make it a hundred percent,
just to add a beneficiary you just need their basic information. Always make sure you have at
least one beneficiary. Going back over here to the left if you look at paycheck contributions,
click on my contributions it's going to bring you to this page right here where it shows you you're
contributing $980 a paycheck into a Roth account . So every 457b, almost everyone since 2006 all
401ks and retirement plans can have a Roth option to them so most retirement plans now have a Roth
or traditional. You may have traditional, you may have Roth, you may be contributing to both.Your
employer match however is always going to go into traditional regardless of whether you choose Roth
or traditional . So if you want to edit how much that you're contributing per paycheck
you hit edit and you can either do a percent of your paycheck five percent ten percent fifteen
percent twenty percent or you can choose a dollar amount of your paycheck and you can change it to
whatever amount that you want and on this screen you choose before tax which would be traditional
or Roth which would be after tax. So I'm going to do all Roth contributions like I've been doing.
So a thousand dollars into my Roth contribution, hit continue, so now I've adjusted to a thousand
dollars going a paycheck into my Roth account, hit confirm and continue and it'll bring you a screen
that confirms that you've made those changes. Now let's go over to the left hand side click my
investments. So your Investments is going to break down what you're currently invested in that's
under the current tab to see the future what you've allocated in the future you hit the future
tab. So I have 40% going into the Vanguard large cap, 35% in the mid cap, 25% into the small cap,
if you want to change your Investments this is important because a lot of you guys are going to
need to change your Investments... click on this blue button change my investments, you're going
to always do it yourself rebalance your investment you probably don't need to do that that's going to
be if you want to set a certain percentage for each investment and then over time it'll start
heavily investing more and one to get it to that percentage that you want it at. More likely than
not if you have something right now that you're invested in like a Target date fund for example,
you're in Target date fund 2050 and you want to invest in specific funds that outperform
that Target date you need to change what you're invested in right now and you do that by hitting
this middle one "trade specific funds". Okay so you're going to change how my current balance
is invested so scroll down to the bottom of this page and it's going to show you your Investments
and the balance that you have invested into each. If you want to trade from any of them whatever
it says on yours Target Fund 2040 and that's all you're invested in and you want to move the total
of Sixteen thousand two hundred sixty four dollars in here, I want to move that all out of there I
put a hundred percent of this sixteen thousand dollars I want to transfer... okay and I want
to transfer it to 50% in the mid cap and 50% into the Vanguard institutional index. So I plug in 50%
and 50% each I hit review transfers. Hit OK for the warning and it's showing you here a summary
of what you're about to do. So I'm going to move this amount of money from the small cap Vanguard
index into half of it's going to go into the mid cap and the other half is going to go into the
institutional index, hit submit and that is how you trade out of whatever specific funds you're
in right now. If you want to invest in better options... now what if you want to change your
future Investments or you've just changed your current Investments and now you want to make sure
your future Investments line up with whatever we just transferred. So come back to my investments
click the future tab change my investments, always do it yourself and we're going to change
the future investment. So click the blue button and under this screen right here you can allocate
so if you're contributing a thousand dollars per paycheck it's going to split that thousand
dollars 25% into this fund, 35% in this fund, 40% into this fund. You can either get rid of these
funds if you don't want to continue to invest in it like say you're in a Target date fund get rid
of that one and then add the funds that you want to contribute to so I'm going to move some of it
I want to go into this real estate fund... click that, click add and make sure you set how much
allocation percentage-wise that you want going in to that specific fund in every future investment.
If you're picking these Investments how do you know which investments are the better Investments.
So that brings us back over to this left hand side hit the investment lineup. This is going to be the
breakdown of all the different investment options that you have in your 401k or 457b. Usually
there's 20 maybe 30 options sometimes there's only 10 options that you can choose from, so let's
compare each option so that we can pick the best investment. So you might be immediately drawn to
the performance Tab and that's fine sometimes the under the performance it's going to be a PDF file
which can be kind of hard to read you can look at this but I find it easier to go to the research
Tab and this will be a more digitized version of the PDF file .It's a little more more interactive.
So here's the list on the left of all the funds that you can choose from, so if we come over
here and we sort them by five years. So five years means that every year on average for the last five
years this fund has done 9.23 percent return. So if you invested a hundred dollars you would have
made nine dollars and twenty three cents off of that hundred dollars the first year and then the
second year you would have made nine percent off of that and so on and so forth . So as you can see
by sorting it you can see the best funds which for this the best fund over the last five years has
been the Vanguard institutional index the second best one at 6.6% has been the Vanguard mid cap and
then we have the Vanguard small cap. So if you want to invest in two three or four funds this
may be a good way to sort them to see what is performing well because even a percentage the
difference between eight percent and nine percent could be massive over a long period of time. We're
talking hundreds of thousands of dollars over your 20 or 30 year working career! So we want to make
sure we're getting the most for our money and if you're looking a little more short-term and you
want to sort it by three years you can do that if you want to sort it by 10 years so you can get a
little bit more historical data you can do that as well. To learn more about the fun you click into
the fund and it'll bring you to this page right here which has all the numbers and the graphs and
usually compare it to other funds and show you why it's so much better, it'll show you expense
ratios, keep scrolling down, amongst all these numbers you're going to find what this fund is
invested in so it has the most of it is invested in Apple the second most is Microsoft, Amazon,
Tesla... so this is a large cap so it's going to be big large American companies typically and that
is how you compare the performance of each fund so you know what you choose to make the most amount
of money off of your Investments. You need to take a loan out of your retirement account you're going
to do it through here and it'll give you numbers and you can request to apply for a loan that way.
Last thing we're going to cover is some of you may have an option to do a "brokerage account" here,
so what that means is some plans offer instead of keeping your money through empower you have a
Charles Schwab option or Fidelity option to do an account through them so the money is still in your
401k or your 457b but it's just not being held by Empower it's being held by Charles Schwab or
whatever the broker is. The benefit to this is you still have all the tax advantages, sill protected
it's it's still in your retirement account however you just have a lot more options you have as many
options as Charles Schwab has which is tens of thousands of options as opposed to just the 10 to
30 options within your 401. So if you don't find that you're getting aggressive enough investment
options or diverse enough investment options within your 457 or your 401k plan you may have
to go through the brokerage account so you can invest in something that fits you better. That's
all we're going to cover on this, remember the most important options are going to be choosing
your investments make sure that you're currently invested in something good and all your future
Investments are set up so it's automatic out of your paycheck into good solid Investments.
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to hear more financial educational content. Thank you! I'll see you in the next video!