If your employer offers BrightPlan as a financial wellness benefit, please use the sign up instructions available from your employer.

After providing your name and email, we verify your email address by sending you a set password link. Once you set your password you're ready to start planning by answering a few questions about your financial situation and appetite for risk.

If BrightPlan is not a benefit at your company yet, please contact us and let us know you'd like it. We will reach out to you once your company is on board.

Goals in BrightPlan are significant future financial commitments: the milestones you are striving toward like buying a home, traveling, education, or retirement.

BrightPlan provides goal planners for each goal type to help you plan, save, invest, and track your progress over time.

To help you get and stay on track for your goals, BrightPlan employs financial planning and modeling algorithms to estimate both the future value of your savings and future cost of your goal based on inflation and investment returns projections.

When a goal is at risk or off track, BrightPlan will suggest next steps to help bring the goal back on track.

You can fill your financial plan with a variety of goals including:

• College Education
• Retirement
• Emergency Fund
• Debt Reduction
• Taking a Trip
• Buying a Home
• A Major Purchase (a car, wedding, or other big ticket item)
• Philanthropy
• General Investing
• Custom - Save for a goal of your choice.

Goal setting is a key to life and financial success. Research suggests that people can enhance their likelihood of achieving a variety of goals by writing them down and creating a clear actionable plans to accomplish them.

Understanding and quantifying your short- and long-term goals is particularly important for financial planning.

A goals-based financial plan can help you determine how to prioritize spending and saving, how much to save for various goals, when to invest, how much risk to take in your investments, and what account types to invest within. 

The BrightSide Blog has a wealth of information about the value of goal setting. We aim to educate you to set and accomplish your most important goals, both for your own financial independence and to leave a legacy that lives on beyond your years.

Every time you create a goal, BrightPlan helps you build a plan one step at a time.

Step 1: Write it Down 

The first step is answering, "Why is this goal important to you?" Your mantra serves as a continual reminder that this goal is worthy of your effort, focus, and investment.

Step 2: Make it Actionable 

We help you put a deadline on your goal with a target date, and to put a price tag on it with a target amount.

Step 3: Fund Your Goal

Save for your goal by linking your existing accounts at other institutions, or open a BrightPlan Managed Investment Account and we'll automate saving and investing for you.

BrightPlan also suggests monthly or one-time contributions and a goals-based investment plan to apply to your current and future savings.

Step 4: Track Progress

Finally, we work to keep you inspired by allowing you to track progress toward your goals over time.

You can see your probability of success change dynamically, track the value of all savings linked to your goal, and view simulations of your progress based on projections of better or worse market conditions.

BrightPlan supports account linking with thousands of financial institutions including banks, credit unions, credit cards, student loan and mortgage providers, and investment accounts.

You can link accounts from three locations:

• any goal wizard,
• on a goal detail page, or
• in the financial accounts dashboard.

In order to link an account, select "add account" from one of these locations and input the online login credentials for your institution of choice.

It may take a minute or two to form a connection and pull the data. Your login credentials give BrightPlan read only access to surface the account's transactions, balances, and performance to give you real-time financial planning insights within the BrightPlan app. BrightPlan does not store the credentials and cannot make transfers into or out of your account.

If you close an account you can easily hide or remove it from the app from the financial accounts dashboard. If you prefer not to electronically link your accounts or use a financial institution we do not yet support, manually account tracking is also supported.

The goal detail page is mission control for your goal. On this page you can edit the details for a goal, and find key information including:

1. The status of your goal. On track, at risk, or needs attention.
2. Our advice if your goal needs attention, including additional savings recommendations.
3. Your investment plan. This is our recommended asset allocation of stocks and bonds for your goal and investment profile.
4. Financial accounts linked to this goal. This tab allows you to link and track accounts from external institutions like your bank or 401(k) provider, and to open and monitor a BrightPlan Investment Account to fund your goal.
5. Your goal simulation. We stress test your goal with 1,000 simulations of future market returns for each asset class and inflation outcomes, and present the outcomes in a graph showing the outcome of your goal in better, worse, and average market conditions. 

We take security very seriously and have multiple measures in place to keep your account information is safe.

Your account is required to have a strong password that must be changed periodically.

Your connection to BrightPlan is protected by SSL Encryption so that information shared between you and BrightPlan is secure.

Sensitive data is encrypted at rest and in transit.

BrightPlan has limited access to your financial account information, can only move money at your request, and only between accounts you designate.

Moving money between your bank and investment accounts is only handled with your authorization to our independent third-party custodian, TD Ameritrade.

All data is stored in Salesforce servers that have met multiple standards for PCI compliance and security.

Yes. BrightPlan is a registered investment advisor, regulated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission under the Investment Advisers Act of 1940.

This regulation includes many rules to protect investors, but a few may be of interest to you:

1. Fiduciary duty. As a registered investment advisor BrightPlan has a fiduciary duty to clients. That means we must put client interests above those of the firm, avoiding any conflicts of interest, and providing investment advice with the highest duty of loyalty and care.

As the first digital advisor to achieve certification by the Centre for Fiduciary Excellence (CEFEX), BrightPlan adheres to the highest standards to act in your best interests.

2. Clear disclosures. BrightPlan is required to give full and fair disclosure of all material facts when working clients or prospective clients. Rather than leaving you to wonder whether we have hidden conflicts of interest, we are required to disclose potential conflicts of interests and how we work to address them. One way we accomplish this is through delivering and regularly updating the form ADV Part 2.

3. Guidelines. The SEC requires BrightPlan to maintain certain documents including a Code of Ethics, Business Continuity Plan, and books and records of client agreements, marketing documents, financial statements and more. All of these measures are in place to protect investors.

Linking all of your assets and liabilities to BrightPlan allows you to see an accurate, comprehensive picture of your finances. Every day your account balances, transactions, and holdings will refresh within BrightPlan, keeping this picture up to date.

By linking all of your accounts in one place, you no longer need to log in and out of all of your financial service providers to stay on top of your finances.

Saving and investment accounts can also be linked to any goal to track your savings automatically. For instance, you could link your 401(k) from work, your partner's IRA, and a joint taxable account to your retirement goal to track all of your retirement savings.

While liabilities like credit cards, student loans, or mortgages cannot be linked to a goal, you can view them on the financial accounts dashboard to track your net worth and cash flow.

Yes! Unlike many other digital advisors, you cannot invest with BrightPlan.  Everyone gets to benefit from our financial planning advice.

As a planning only client you can create financial goals, link unlimited external financial accounts, track your net worth and cash flow, read our educational content, apply the investment plan we recommend to your investment accounts, and simulate your financial future. All without investing a dime.

An investment portfolio is all of the assets held by a person or institution. Portfolios often include the three major asset classes of stocks, bonds, and cash.

Having a diverse mix of investments in your portfolio can provide protection against "having all of your eggs in one basket."

Regular rebalancing is an easy strategy to stick to your investment plan. As time passes your portfolio will grow irregularlyand drift from the recommended asset allocation. Rebalancing brings it back on track.

For example, a run-up in U.S. Stocks could push your portfolio from a 60% stocks and 40% bonds to 70% stocks and 30% bonds. Increasing bonds in the portfolio or decreasing stocks will regain balance.

Rebalancing could be accomplished by investing new contributions only into bonds until the account regained the 60/40 mix, or selling some of the stock position to buy more bonds. Rebalancing is important because when you drift from your plan your risk and return profile changes.

Depending on what the market does, a failure to rebalance can mean either taking too much risk for your goal, or too little. Either extreme can put your goals in jeopardy.

Yes, like all investments in the stock or bond markets, your investments carry risk of loss when prices of the securities in these markets drop.

This is why for both your emergency fund and for very short-term goals, we recommend a very conservative portfolio of cash or cash-equivalents. For longer term goals, we will suggest taking on market risk for the potential of greater returns.

Always remember that risk and return are closely related. In order to generate returns on their money investors take on the risk of loss. This means the potential for losses of your investment principle.

You should only invest in the plan we recommend if you feel comfortable with the potential downside risk of investing and you are prepared to hold your investments for the time period you provided when creating your goal. 

Yes, there are fees associated, however, your company has taken care of these fees for you.  You will never be asked for any money from a BrightPlan employee.  All our advisors are fiduciaries and responsible to give you sound guidance based on your individual situation.

The BrightPlan retirement planner is deceptively simple, but has sophisticated capabilities to handle most life situations. The retirement planner guides you through the following inputs:

1. How much retirement income do you require from your plan? BrightPlan will suggestsnumbers based on your current earnings and a desired lifestyle. All inputs are in today's money. You don't have to worry about how inflation will change your income needs in the future. We will adjust the amounts for inflation.

2. When do you want to retire? This tells BrightPlan how long you will be saving for and how long your savings need to last. We assume a lifespan of 90 years.

3. How much have you already saved? Here you should add up all your 401K, 403B, IRA, Roth IRA and taxable savings accounts. Later you will be able to link these accounts to the goal so BrightPlan an monitor the balances and automatically update your goal and recaluculate the probability of success.

4. How much will you save for retirement? BrightPlan needs to know how much you will save towards retirement across all your retirement accounts, including any additional savings you plan to make.

BrightPlan then analyzes your goal, including data about you and comes up with a suggested Investment Plan for your retirement goal.

We then stress test your goal by using a Monte Carlo simulation to run 1,000 simulations of your goal. Each test uses different projected market conditions, long and short-term capital gains, and inflation adjustments. This test allows BrightPlan to calculate your probability of success and helps you see how different market conditions could impact your plan.

After the initial analysis, you can improve your goal by modeling other expected incomes or contributions. For example, you can factor in social security, income from a part time job, a windfall from the proceeds of selling a home and downsizing, or any other income event relevant to your retirement. BrightPlan will then re-analyse your goal to take these additional factors into account.

To calculate your probability of success we make a few assumptions in the retirement goal planner. These assumptions include:

• Your target annual retirement income will increase each year by the inflation estimate at the bottom of the goal.
• Your contributions and savings will also increase by this inflation amount.
• The asset allocation for all linked retirement accounts is the same as the investment plan for your goal.
• The portfolio will deliver similar average returns and volatility as a representative index portfolio has over the past 27 years.
• Capital gains are taxed at a 28% rate for short term gains and a 15% rate for long term gains.

After creating a goal, you can edit the goal parameters on the panels within the goal detail page.

Tap the pencil icon adjacent to your goal status (e.g. "On Track") to edit your target date or amount.

You can update planned contributions to your goal from the pencil icon on the "External Contributions and Income" or "BrightPlan Deposits" panels.

Our aggregation vendor, Yodlee, has integrations with thousands of financial institutions.

From time to time, a vendor changes the integration with Yodlee and Yodlee is unable to refresh the data for an account.

Yodlee assumes that the account is closed when it repeatedly fails to connect to your account. Linking the account again should fix the issue by forcing a refresh of your account.

You may notice a different designation for your accounts when you relink them. That is expected if the Vendor has changed the way they share data with Yodlee.

The primary reason for connectivity issues is linked accounts with two-factor authentication enabled.

When you link the account initially we use a token from your bank or investment institution to connect the account, but that token expires.

When the account linking token expires you will be asked to re-enter your second factor for the account (usually getting a code sent to you by text or email). Tap the "Unable to Connect. Fix" prompt to go through this process.

The frequency of this activity depends on the policy at your bank or financial institution. You may be required to enter the second factor every time you sign into BrightPlan or it may be as infrequent as monthly.