Privacy

Your email address. Collected when you subscribe to the newsletter or create a membership. Used to deliver the content you asked for, to send billing and account notices, and to manage your account.

Your first name, if you give it, so emails and the portal can address you.

A sale you choose to record, only if you use the reminder on My Path: the name of the holding you sold at a loss, the date, and whether you asked to be emailed on day 31. It is used to send that one reminder and nothing else.

Your mobile number, only if you choose to receive text alerts. It is used to send the alerts you asked for and nothing else. You are never required to give it, and you can remove it at any time.

Your onboarding answers. Gold+ asks for your age, your target retirement age, your approximate investable portfolio (a number or a range, your choice), roughly what you spend each month, your state and tax filing status, your planning phase, and what you are most concerned about. See the onboarding section below for how those are used.

What you enter in the calculators, and the results they produce. See the calculator section below.

Your progress through the portal, including which path steps you have completed and which accounts you have told us about.

Payment information, handled entirely by Stripe. Refined FI never sees or stores your card number, CVV, or billing address. We store only the identifiers Stripe gives us to link your account to your subscription.

A record of the alerts we sent you, so the same alert is not sent twice.

Ordinary request data, which every website receives: your IP address, your browser and device type, the page you requested, and the page you came from.

Anything you type into the contact form. See the contact form section below.

Your calculator inputs and results are saved to your account, so they are waiting for you when you come back and so your path can show a summary of what you have already worked out. That includes figures such as balances, contributions, spending, and the retirement number they produce. It also includes your portfolio audit: the accounts you list, the holdings inside them, their balances, and any gains or losses you enter.

This is the most sensitive information we hold. It is saved for one reason, which is to serve you the next time you sign in. It is never sold, never used for advertising, and never given to anyone outside the providers listed below who host and secure it on our behalf.

It is stored in our database at Supabase, tied to your account, which means tied to your email address. We are not going to pretend it is anonymous. You can erase it yourself at any time, and the section on deletion explains how.

When you are not signed in. The free calculators do not need an account. If you ask one to email you your result, we store your email address, which calculator you used, and the numbers you entered. We use it to understand who is using the site: which tools people run, and roughly where they are in their retirement. It is never sold, never used for advertising, and never given to anyone. If you would rather we did not store it, do not ask for the email. The calculator works without one and stores nothing.

Your onboarding answers do two jobs, and it is worth being clear about the second one.

First, they build your path and prefill the calculators, so you are not typing the same numbers twice.

Second, we keep a record of each completed onboarding, including your age, planning phase, approximate portfolio, monthly spending, state and filing status, what you said you were most concerned about, and any question you typed in yourself. Refined FI reviews that record to understand what members actually need and to decide what to build and write next. That is product and market research for this business only. It is not sold, not shared, and not used for advertising.

Those research records are tied to your account. They are deleted when you clear your saved data and when you close your account.

Text alerts are optional and off unless you switch them on. When you switch them on we send a code to the number to confirm it is yours, and after that we send alerts only for the market conditions you asked to be told about.

We do not sell, rent, or share your mobile number with anyone for their own marketing, and we never give it to data brokers. Twilio delivers the messages for us, and it necessarily handles your number and the content of the alert in order to do that. Nobody else receives it.

Reply STOP to any alert to stop them, or START to turn them back on. You can also switch them off from your Account page, and remove your number entirely there. How often you hear from us depends on market conditions, and is typically a few messages a year. Message and data rates may apply.

The contact form is operated by Formspree. When you submit it, your name, email address, subject, and message are sent to Formspree, which stores the submission and forwards it to us by email.

Do not put account numbers, passwords, Social Security numbers, or other sensitive identifiers in the contact form. We never need them, and we will never ask you for them.

Refined FI uses Vercel Web Analytics and Vercel Speed Insights on the public site and in the portal. They are active now.

Both are cookieless. They do not set a tracking cookie, do not build an advertising profile, and do not follow you to other websites. They report which pages are viewed, roughly where visitors come from, what browser and device they use, and how quickly pages load. Speed Insights is switched off on the sign-in, sign-up, and password reset pages.

We use this to see which articles are read and which pages are slow. We do not use it to identify you individually, and we do not join it to your member record.

Homepage tests. From time to time we show more than one version of the homepage to find out which one people understand. If you arrive on one of those pages, a session cookie holds a single letter saying which version you saw, and a random visit number kept in your browser lets us count which pages that visit opened on this site, whether it pressed the button, ran a calculator, or left an email. The count holds the letter, the number and the page addresses, not your name, and it is not joined to your member record. If you leave an email on a calculator during a test, the letter is noted beside it so we can compare versions. Both are gone when you close your browser.

Running this service means using outside providers. Here is the complete list and what each one handles.

• Supabase hosts our database and handles sign-in. It stores your account, your onboarding answers, your saved calculator data, and your portal progress.
• Stripe processes payments and runs the billing portal where you manage or cancel your subscription. It holds your card details and billing records. Refined FI does not.
• Vercel hosts and serves the website, and provides the analytics described above. As the host, it processes ordinary request data including your IP address.
• Resend delivers our email, both the newsletter and account and billing notices. Because it delivers the messages themselves, it processes whatever a message contains: your email address, your first name, delivery and open status, and the content of billing notices, such as your renewal amount and the last four digits of your card.
• Twilio delivers text alerts to members who switch them on. It handles your mobile number and the content of the alert.
• Formspree receives contact form submissions, as described above.
• Vimeo plays the walkthrough videos in the member portal. When a page with a video loads, the embedded player connects to Vimeo, which sees your IP address and may set its own cookies under its own privacy policy. Vimeo does not receive your name, email, or any member data from us.

These companies process your data to provide their service to us, under their own terms and privacy policies. They are not permitted to use it for their own marketing.

We may also disclose information if the law requires it, or to protect our rights, safety, or property. If Refined FI is ever sold or merged, member data may transfer as part of that transaction, and we will say so here before it takes effect.

Refined FI sets the minimum number of cookies needed to make the site work.

Session cookies. If you are signed in, a session cookie keeps you signed in as you move between pages. It expires when you close your browser or after a set period.

Stripe cookies. When you interact with a payment form or the billing portal, Stripe sets cookies for fraud prevention and payment security. These are required by Stripe and are governed by Stripe's privacy policy.

Vimeo cookies. On portal pages with a walkthrough video, the embedded Vimeo player may set its own cookies, governed by Vimeo's privacy policy. These appear only where a video appears.

Homepage test cookie. During a homepage test, one session cookie of our own holds a single letter saying which version of the homepage you saw. It is described under Site analytics above, and it expires when you close your browser.

There are no advertising cookies and no retargeting pixels. No Facebook pixel, no Google Ads tag, no affiliate tracking scripts. Our analytics, described above, does not use cookies at all.

The site does not monetize your attention. It monetizes the content.

Your information is encrypted in transit and encrypted at rest. Database rules restrict every member record so that only your own signed-in account can read it.

To be precise about what that means: it is not end-to-end encryption. The service has to be able to read your data to show it back to you, so Refined FI can access member records when it is needed to run the service or to answer a support request, and for no other reason.

No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee that a determined attacker will never succeed. If a breach affects your data, we will tell you, and we will provide any notice applicable law requires.

You can erase your data yourself, at any time, from the Account page in the portal. You do not have to email anyone.

"Clear my saved data" deletes your onboarding answers, the research record of those answers, your path progress, and your saved calculator inputs and results. Your membership, your login, and your email preferences are left alone.

"Close my account and delete everything" does all of the above, then cancels your subscription, removes you from our mailing lists, and deletes your login, your name, and your email address. You are signed out immediately and cannot sign back in.

Both actions delete your data from our live systems immediately, and there is no undo we can offer you. Residual copies can persist for a limited time in our database provider's encrypted backups until those expire on the provider's schedule; backups are used only for disaster recovery, never to restore data a member chose to delete.

Two things we cannot erase on request. Payment and invoice records held by Stripe are kept as long as tax and financial law requires. Ordinary server logs held by our host expire on that host's schedule.

While your account is open, we keep your data for as long as you keep the account. We do not set an expiry on it, because the entire point of saving it is that it is there when you come back.

Every marketing email we send has an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing takes effect for all marketing email. Billing and account notices, including the renewal notice we send at least 30 days before your membership renews, are not marketing and will still be sent while your account is open, because you need them.

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to see the personal information we hold about you, correct it, delete it, or receive a copy of it. The Account page gives you deletion directly. For anything else, ask through the contact form and we will respond.

We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, so there is no opt-out to offer for those. We will never charge you a different price or give you a worse service for exercising a privacy right.

Refined FI is operated from the United States, and your data is stored and processed there.

Refined FI is for adults. The Services are not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18. If we learn that we have, we will delete it.

We update this document whenever what we actually do changes, and the last-updated date at the top changes with it. If a change materially affects how we handle member data, we will tell members by email before it takes effect.