Terms of Use

These Terms of Use are a legally binding agreement between you and Refined Abundance LLC, a Colorado limited liability company doing business as Refined FI. In this document, "Refined FI," "we," and "us" mean Refined Abundance LLC.

They govern your use of the Refined FI website, newsletters, member portal, calculators, model portfolios, indicators including the Risk Monitor, email alerts, and every other product or service we offer, which we call the Services.

By using any part of the Services, you agree to these terms. If you do not agree with any part of them, your only option is to stop using the Services.

These terms incorporate our Disclosures and our Privacy document by reference. Read all three.

These are our standard terms, offered to every member on the same basis; we are not able to negotiate them individually. They contain an arbitration agreement and a class action waiver in the disputes section below. That section limits your ability to bring a claim against us in front of a judge and jury. You should read it carefully.

You must be at least 18 years old, or the age of majority where you live if that is higher, and able to enter into a legally binding agreement in order to use the Services or hold a membership.

Refined FI is operated from the United States and is intended for residents of the United States. Our content, calculators, tax discussion, and account-type guidance assume United States tax and retirement law throughout, and they will be wrong or misleading elsewhere.

We make no representation that the Services are appropriate or available for use outside the United States. If you access them from another country, you do so at your own initiative and are responsible for complying with local law.

The Services and everything published in them, including text, images, charts, data, calculators, model portfolios, indicator values, and the look and feel of the site, are owned or licensed by Refined FI and protected by copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property law. Nothing in these terms gives you any ownership of them.

Subject to these terms, we grant you permission to access and use the Services for your personal, non-commercial use. You may read the Services on your own devices, save or print a copy of an item for your own reference, share our public content using the sharing features on the site, and link to our public content with proper attribution.

Any other use requires our prior written permission. Your membership is for you. You may not share your login, and you may not provide member content to anyone who is not a member.

That includes the model portfolios and their holdings, the Risk Monitor readings and their history, and anything else behind the member sign-in. Do not post them on a forum, a social network, a group chat, or anywhere else someone who is not a member can read them.

You may read Refined FI, save a copy for your own use, and share a link.

Our public pages are open to search engines and AI systems. You may crawl them, index them, and quote a short passage with attribution and a link to the original page.

You may not do the following without written permission:

• Bulk-download, mirror, or systematically extract our content, data, or indicator values by any automated means.
• Crawl the site in a way that ignores our robots.txt file, or at a rate that burdens our servers.
• Use member-only material, or Refined FI indicator values including Risk Monitor readings and their history, to develop, train, fine-tune, or evaluate any machine learning or artificial intelligence system.
• Republish, resell, redistribute, or syndicate Refined FI content or indicator values, in whole or in part. Reproducing a full article is not permitted.
• Access member-only material without a current membership, or reconstruct it from public summaries.
• Frame, embed, mirror, or cache any part of this site inside another site or product.
• Access the site after we have suspended or revoked your access.

Refined FI indicator values, including Risk Monitor readings and their history, are a licensed product, not public data. Access to them is for your personal use only.

This section survives the end of your membership. Ending a membership does not give you the right to redistribute what you had access to while it was active.

In addition to the restrictions above, you agree not to:

• Use the Services to violate any law, or in connection with any illegal activity.
• Infringe the intellectual property rights of Refined FI or anyone else.
• Attempt to circumvent, reverse engineer, decrypt, disable, or otherwise interfere with the Services or their security, or assist anyone else in doing so.
• Take any action that places an unreasonable load on our infrastructure, including denial of service attacks.
• Use our trademarks or trade names in meta tags, keywords, or in any way that suggests an endorsement or affiliation that does not exist.
• Create an account using someone else's information, or create accounts for fraudulent purposes.
• Present Refined FI content as your own advice to a client or third party.

We may suspend or revoke your access if you violate these restrictions. Violations may also expose you to civil or criminal liability.

Gold+ is an annual membership. It costs $379 per year and it renews automatically every year until you cancel.

When you subscribe, you authorize us and our payment processor, Stripe, to charge your payment method $379, and to charge that method again on each annual renewal date at the price then in effect, without further action by you.

We will email you at least 30 days before each renewal, telling you the renewal date, the amount, and the card we will charge. That notice is a billing notice, not marketing, so it is sent whether or not you receive our other email.

You can cancel at any time, without contacting us, from the Account page in the member portal, which opens Stripe's secure billing portal. Cancelling stops all future charges. Your access continues through the end of the term you already paid for, and then ends.

If we change the price of a membership, the new price applies to renewals only, and we will tell you before it takes effect. If your payment fails, we may retry it and may suspend or end your access if it continues to fail.

Promotional or introductory pricing, when offered, is available to first-time members only and renews at the standard price unless we say otherwise at the time.

Your first year is guaranteed. Run your numbers in the calculators and follow your path. If Gold+ does not show you at least a year, tell us within 60 days of your purchase and we will refund that year in full.

To qualify, enter your own figures in the Retirement Number Calculator and the Contribution Waterfall Calculator, and work through the steps on your path for your retirement stage. The guarantee is about what the system shows you, which is produced from your own numbers in your first session. It is not a promise about investment returns, which nobody can make.

Ask through the contact form within 60 days of your purchase and we will refund the year you paid for. Your access then ends.

Outside that guarantee, sales are final. Except where a refund is required by applicable law, no refunds are issued once a purchase is completed and access has been granted, including partial refunds for an unused portion of a term. Membership grants immediate access to the full body of member material, including model portfolios, research, and indicator history, and that material cannot be returned once it has been read.

You can also simply cancel. Cancelling any time before your renewal date means you are never charged again. Nothing about this policy locks you into a second year.

We may change, suspend, or discontinue any part of the Services at any time. Content, model portfolios, indicators, and features may be added, revised, or withdrawn. We are not liable to you or to anyone else for doing so.

We do not guarantee that the Services will be available without interruption, that any particular indicator will continue to be published, or that any email will be delivered.

Refined FI is education, not advice. The full boundaries of the service, including our status as a publisher rather than a registered adviser, the limits of our indicators, and the limits of backtested performance, are set out in our Disclosures, which form part of this agreement.

The services and all content are provided on an "as is" and "as available" basis. To the maximum extent permitted by law, Refined Abundance LLC, its members, officers, contractors, contributors, suppliers, and licensors disclaim all warranties and conditions of any kind, whether express, implied, or statutory, including all warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, accuracy, and non-infringement. We make no warranty that the services will meet your requirements, will be available on an uninterrupted, timely, secure, or error-free basis, or will be accurate, reliable, complete, legal, or safe.

Our content is not a substitute for professional legal, financial, or tax advice. We will have no liability for decisions you make based on our content.

In no event will Refined Abundance LLC, its members, officers, contractors, contributors, suppliers, or licensors be liable to you or any third party for any lost profits, lost savings, lost data, costs of procurement of substitute products, or any indirect, consequential, exemplary, incidental, special or punitive damages arising from or relating to your use of the services or content, or your inability to use the services or content, even if we have been advised of the possibility of such damages. Access to, and use of, the services is at your own discretion and risk.

The maximum aggregate liability of Refined Abundance LLC and all related parties to you or any third party for any damages arising from your access and use of our services or content or this agreement, for any cause whatsoever and regardless of the form of the action, will be limited to the greater of fifty US dollars (U.S. $50) or the amount paid by you to Refined FI for the service(s) giving rise to the claim(s) during the preceding 12 months. The existence of more than one claim will not increase this limit.

If applicable law in your jurisdiction does not allow the above limitations, liability will be limited to the fullest extent permitted by applicable law.

You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless Refined Abundance LLC and its members, officers, contractors, contributors, licensors, and licensees from and against any liability and costs, including court costs and reasonable attorneys' fees, arising out of your breach of these terms, or your gross negligence or willful misconduct in connection with the Services.

We will use reasonable efforts to notify you of any such claim. We reserve the right, at your expense, to assume the exclusive defense and control of any matter subject to indemnification by you, and you agree to cooperate with that defense.

This section establishes how any dispute between you and Refined FI will be resolved. It includes a waiver of your right to a jury trial and to participate in a class action, and it limits the types of relief you can seek. Read it carefully.

Talk to us first.

If you and Refined FI have a dispute relating to the Services or these terms, both of us agree to try to resolve it informally before taking any other legal action. You start that process by sending a notice through the contact form with your full name, your contact information, what the problem is, and what you would like us to do about it. If we have a dispute with you, we will send a similar notice to the email address on your account. Both of us agree to work in good faith for at least 30 days. Only after those 30 days may either of us begin arbitration.

Agreement to arbitrate.

Except as stated below, all claims between you and Refined FI that are not resolved informally will be settled by binding, individual arbitration. The exceptions are claims involving intellectual property rights, claims that can be brought in small claims court, and claims relating to your violation of the automated access or acceptable use sections above.

Waiver of jury trial. For all claims other than those exceptions, you and Refined FI are giving up the right to file a lawsuit in court and the right to a jury trial. Instead there will be a hearing before a neutral arbitrator. In arbitration there is no judge and no jury, and there is less discovery and less appellate review than in court.

Class action waiver. You and Refined FI agree that each party may bring claims against the other only in an individual capacity, and not as a plaintiff or class member in any purported class or representative proceeding, including a federal or state class action lawsuit or a class arbitration.

If a court decides that applicable law prevents enforcement of any part of that waiver as to a particular claim or remedy, and all appeals are exhausted, then that part of the claim will be decided by a bench trial, meaning a trial before a judge without a jury, in the state or federal courts located in Colorado, and only after all other claims have been arbitrated.

How arbitration works.

This section is governed and enforced under the Federal Arbitration Act. Arbitration will be administered by JAMS under its Streamlined Arbitration Rules and Procedures. The demand must be signed by the party bringing it and must certify that the informal process above was followed. Fees are paid according to JAMS rules, except that if the arbitrator finds you cannot afford the JAMS fees and cannot obtain a waiver, we will pay them for you. A demand must be filed within one year of the date the claim arose, or the claim is waived. Arbitration will be held in Colorado unless both parties agree to arbitrate remotely.

The arbitrator has exclusive authority to decide the scope and enforceability of this section, and has the same authority to award relief on an individual basis that a judge would have. The arbitrator's award is final and binding.

No mass arbitration.

An arbitration will not be consolidated or joined with any other case. If 25 or more arbitration demands asserting substantially similar facts or claims and seeking substantially similar relief are filed by the same law firm or by collaborating firms within 180 days of the first such demand, Refined FI may elect, at its sole discretion, to combine those demands and proceed under the JAMS Mass Arbitration Procedures, and you agree to that election.

How to opt out.

You may opt out of this arbitration agreement. Send us a notice through the contact form with the subject line "ARBITRATION OPT-OUT" within 30 days of the later of the last-updated date at the top of this page or your first use of the Services. If you opt out, neither you nor Refined FI is bound by this arbitration agreement, and each of us keeps the right to a trial by judge or jury as the law allows. Opting out has no effect on your membership.

For any claim that is excluded from arbitration, the sole jurisdiction and venue is an appropriate state or federal court located in Colorado. We also reserve the right to seek an injunction from any court of competent jurisdiction at any time to stop a threatened breach of the automated access or acceptable use sections.

This entire section survives the end of these terms and the end of your membership.

You may stop using the Services at any time, and may cancel a membership as described above.

We may suspend or terminate your access at any time if you breach these terms. If we terminate your access for a breach, you are not entitled to a refund of any fee.

Provisions that by their nature should survive termination do survive it, including the sections on automated access, disclaimers, limitation of liability, indemnification, disputes, and governing law.

We may update these terms. Changes take effect when posted, and the last-updated date at the top of this page will change with them.

If a change is material, we will tell members by email or with a notice on the site before it takes effect. Continuing to use the Services after a change takes effect means you accept it. If you do not accept a change, stop using the Services and cancel your membership.

These terms and any dispute between you and Refined FI are governed by the laws of the State of Colorado, without regard to its conflict of laws rules, except that the arbitration section is governed by the Federal Arbitration Act.

The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply.

Electronic communications. You consent to receive communications from us electronically, and you agree that any agreement, notice, or disclosure we send you electronically satisfies any legal requirement that it be in writing.

Notice. You are responsible for keeping a current email address on your account. Notices we send are effective when sent, even if you do not see them. Send notices to us through the contact form.

Entire agreement and severability. These terms, together with the Disclosures and Privacy documents, are the entire agreement between you and us about the Services. If any provision is held invalid or unenforceable, the rest remains in force and the invalid provision is modified to the minimum extent needed to make it enforceable. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it.

Assignment. You may not assign or transfer these terms without our written consent. We may assign them in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets. There are no third-party beneficiaries to this agreement.