An Investment Portfolio Tracker for College Grads: What to Track

Empower Personal Dashboard (formerly Personal Capital) is free and aggregates a 401(k), Roth IRA, and brokerage account in one view, in exchange for an occasional sales-call follow-up.

Capture the full 401(k) match first (about $3,584 at the NACE-median salary), then fully fund the $7,500 Roth IRA, then return to the 401(k) up to its $24,500 cap.

Most target-date 2065 funds default to roughly 90% equities, which is the consensus allocation for a 40-plus-year horizon — the harder question is whether the Roth IRA matches it.

Empower Personal Dashboard (formerly Personal Capital) is free and aggregates a 401(k), Roth IRA, and brokerage account in one view, in exchange for an occasional sales-call follow-up.

Empower's free dashboard is the most common starting point because it links to nearly every major 401(k) record-keeper, IRA custodian, and brokerage, and it does not charge for the aggregation. The trade-off is that Empower will reach out by phone if your aggregated balance crosses roughly $100,000; their advisory product is a real product they're trying to sell. For most recent grads in year one, the balances are well below that threshold, so the friction is minimal. Alternatives include MFFT, Monarch, Kubera, and a self-built Google Sheet — all viable, but Empower's combination of free and breadth is hard to beat for the under-$50,000 use case.

Capture the full 401(k) match first (about $3,584 at the NACE-median salary), then fully fund the $7,500 Roth IRA, then return to the 401(k) up to its $24,500 cap.

The order is dictated by the per-dollar return, not the dollar size. The first dollar into a 401(k) is matched by the employer up to about 4.7% of pay on average, so a 6% employee contribution captures roughly $3,584 of free money on a $76,251 salary. Above that, the Roth IRA's $7,500 limit takes priority because the marginal rate at a year-one income is the lowest it is likely to ever be — paying tax now to lock in a tax-free wrapper for forty years is a one-time deal. After both buckets are filled, additional 401(k) contributions are still useful, but the marginal incentive shrinks. The IRS publishes the underlying 2026 limits referenced here (citation 1).

Most target-date 2065 funds default to roughly 90% equities, which is the consensus allocation for a 40-plus-year horizon — the harder question is whether the Roth IRA matches it.

Vanguard, Fidelity, BlackRock, and T. Rowe Price all run their 2065 target-date funds in the 88–92% equity range as of 2024–2025. That's the empirical industry consensus, and it's the right answer for most year-one investors. The harder question is what the Roth IRA looks like, because grads who choose individual funds inside it tend to drift toward whatever is trending — large-cap tech, single sectors, occasionally crypto — without realizing the combined portfolio has slipped from the target-date fund's discipline. A portfolio tracker's job here is to surface the combined allocation across all three accounts, not to second-guess the 401(k) default.

The average maximum employer match across plans is about 4.7% of pay, most commonly delivered as a 50%-on-the-first-6% formula.

Vanguard's How America Saves report tracks plan design across roughly five million participants and finds that the average maximum employer match has settled near 4.7% of pay (citation 3), with a long tail of plans below 3% and a smaller cohort offering more than 6%. The most common formula is 50% on the first 6% of employee contributions, which means an employee contributing 6% picks up an additional 3% from the employer. Plans that offer dollar-for-dollar on the first 4% are also common. The takeaway for a year-one grad is that the contribution rate at which the match maxes out is the most important number on the 401(k) onboarding screen — everything below it is leaving money behind.

Yes — the 2026 limits are independent: $24,500 in a 401(k) plus $7,500 in a Roth IRA, for $32,000 of combined tax-advantaged space.

The IRS treats 401(k) elective deferrals and IRA contributions as separate buckets with separate limits (citation 1). A 22-year-old can contribute up to the full $24,500 401(k) limit and the full $7,500 Roth IRA limit in the same calendar year, subject to the Roth IRA income phase-out, which begins at $153,000 modified adjusted gross income for single filers in 2026. Almost no recent grad approaches that phase-out, so the Roth IRA is fully available. The tax-deferred 401(k) and the after-tax Roth IRA can coexist; many grads run both because the 401(k) typically receives the employer match and the Roth IRA is a tax diversification bet.

Switching jobs before vesting, which can forfeit 60–100 percent of the employer match — often more than $3,000 of compensation a tracker would have shown was 'yours' but wasn't.

Most 401(k) plans use graded vesting over three to five years, which means the employer-match portion of the balance is not fully owned by the employee until they've been at the company for the full schedule. A grad who shows up at month one, contributes for eighteen months, and then leaves often forfeits 60% or more of the match they think they have. The Department of Labor's plan-disclosure rules require the schedule to be shown in the SPD, but it is rarely the line item that drives a job-change decision. A portfolio tracker that distinguishes vested versus unvested balances — many do — makes the cost of an early move visible. For a Class-of-2025 grad with $3,584 of annual match (citation 3), an 18-month departure on a 5-year cliff schedule could forfeit roughly $5,300 of accumulated employer contribution.