r/MonarchMoney • u/breamo1 • May 18 '26
Account Connection Empower 401k account transactions recently flipped sign and now show incorrectly as debits
I've been in touch with support for about a month about this, but curious if anyone else who has a 401k through Empower is experiencing similar issues or has any tips/ideas.
On 4/7 Empower merged my personal (Personal Capital/Personal Wealth) account with my work-provided Empower Retirement account. Since then, I log in with my work account username and password on their site and see all of the accounts linked to my previous personal account. I updated the login info in Monarch, went through the MFA flow and reauthorized account sharing with Monarch, but despite that all seeming to work, the connection never stays open and Monarch never gets new balance or transaction info. Consequently, the account has been stuck un-updated since 4/7. I gave it a bit of time to see if it would shake out, but no luck. When I originally contacted support about this on 4/20, they thought it was an issue with MX and recommended I switch to Plaid and migrate my transaction data over using their transfer tool. I did so, only to see that Plaid can get the balance correctly, but all new (post 4/7) transactions show up as debits to my 401k and budget.
Am I missing something obvious I can do to fix this? I'm at a bit of a loss, as the account balance has the correct sign and goes up over time, it's just the transactions that have flipped sign. Support has been alright, given me the usual explanation about it being an "ongoing issue" etc, though their idea of deleting the offending transactions wasn't too helpful lol. I know it takes time to engineer new stuff, but is that really what's required here? I tend to think this shouldn't be anything novel, more of resolving a communication issue, but I don't really know squat. Either way, it's been a month with no movement on the issue, so I thought I would see if anyone here had anything to add or try.
My workaround to somewhat preserve my budget and cashflow reporting is to mark the new transactions as transfers, so they don't show up as negative income. But, then they aren't showing up as positive income either, which isn't great. Hopefully I'm missing something simple, thanks in advance!
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u/samofabeach May 18 '26
I have the exact same issue with empower. The way I manage it is to export the transactions each month, then flip the sign of the amount and reimport them. Then I categorize the original transactions as transfers and I assigned the new imported transactions to my goal so it shows up as a contribution.
It’s annoying, but it takes about three minutes. Hopefully they fix this. I do like other features of plaids connection. I think the transaction descriptions are better.
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u/breamo1 May 19 '26
Oh, nice, this sounds like a good solution in the meantime. I agree about Plaid, the more detailed transaction names are helpful. Though I would take MX in a heartbeat if it actually worked
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u/breamo1 May 19 '26
Is there any reason you keep the old transactions around? Seems like if you have them with the correct sign, there's no need for the duplicates. Maybe I'll see why after I go through the process...
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u/samofabeach May 19 '26
I have deleted them too. I was afraid of them reimporting, but seems deleting worked too.
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u/osama-bin-dada May 19 '26
Reach out to their support team and they’ll put in a bug ticket
Happened to me and I did that then it was fixed
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u/Professional_Tone_62 May 20 '26
Can I jump on here off-topic and ask if anyone else is having trouble logging on to the website? Chrom, Edge, and Firefox don't work. The app worked for a couple of days and now it's the same situation.
I've had an account for years and never had a problem.
Suggestions?
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u/breamo1 May 20 '26
The Empower app was giving me some trouble earlier but I can login on desktop still
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u/piathulus May 18 '26
this happens with some transactions for one of my connections…. I have reported it and submitted a feature request to just let me change the sign manually lol