Frequently asked questions

Formation is the best-in-class dashboard for managing your own financial life — built for self-directed high-net-worth households who would rather run their own money than hand it to a wealth manager. Net worth, spending, investments, real estate, equity comp, taxes, and goals — in one place, kept current, and tied back to the source for every number.

Two things make it different from a budgeting app. First, every figure is traceable: click a number and you see exactly where it came from. Second, AURA — the built-in AI assistant — turns that complexity into plain-English answers about your actual money, by voice or text, so you can manage your wealth with confidence. The north star is simple: see your wealth, shape your future.

Formation is built for self-directed high-net-worth households — financially capable people who manage their own money, and whose net worth no single login can show. That usually means:

• Eight or more accounts spread across multiple custodians
• More than one entity — trusts, LLCs, joint accounts
• Equity compensation, K-1s, and multi-state tax exposure
• A preference for running your own money — often with a CPA or advisor still in the loop at tax time

If your financial picture lives in five different logins and a spreadsheet, this is for you. That said, a simpler picture is welcome too — it's one plan with full access, whether you link two accounts or twenty.

Those tools are excellent at budgeting for a household with three to five linked accounts and one tax filing. Formation is built for the opposite end: many accounts, multiple entities, K-1s, multi-state exposure, and a CPA in the loop.

The difference isn't aggregation depth at one custodian — it's verifiable computation across all of them. Formation's edge is that every number is sourced and every tax or allocation calculation can be traced and re-derived, not a chat window bolted onto a budget.

Addepar and Masttro serve $25M+ households at roughly $50K–$500K per year, per relationship. Formation delivers the same kind of depth — an entity model, citation discipline, cross-custodian tax-loss harvesting, K-1 ingestion — at a fraction of the price, because the citation-disciplined AI does a lot of the work a junior analyst would otherwise do by hand.

To set expectations clearly:

• Not a bank or custodian. Formation never holds, moves, or has spending access to your money.
• Not a robo-advisor. It doesn't manage your portfolio or place trades for you.
• Not personalized investment, tax, or legal advice. AURA is built for education and analysis. For advice tailored to your situation, talk to a licensed professional — Formation can introduce you to an independent, fee-only partner advisor.

Yes — visit formationmoney.com/demo for a full interactive walkthrough using sample data. No account, no card, nothing to link.

You can create an account with an email and password, or with Sign in with Google or Sign in with Apple. From there, you link your first accounts (or upload a statement) and your net worth populates right away.

Linking your main accounts takes about 10–15 minutes — most of that is the bank's own login and verification flow. Net worth and balances appear immediately. Transaction history and trends keep filling in over the following days as the connections sync.

A good order of operations:

1. Link your largest accounts first (or upload a recent statement if an institution isn't supported).
2. Set up your entities if you have any — trusts, LLCs, joint accounts — and assign accounts to them.
3. Ask AURA a question to get oriented, e.g. "What's my asset allocation across every account?"

Formation is a web app that's fully responsive — it works on phone, tablet, and desktop, no install required. On mobile, a floating button opens AURA's voice mode so you can ask questions hands-free. Native iOS and Android apps aren't available yet.

Yes. Most institutions link directly, but for anything that doesn't — or for historical data from another tool — you can upload a CSV, PDF, OFX/QFX, or image statement and Formation parses it. You can also add manual accounts and enter balances by hand. Manual and uploaded accounts roll into net worth, goals, and forecasts exactly like linked ones.

One plan, full access — no free tier, and every subscription starts with a 7-day free trial:

• Formation — $29.99/month or $349/year list. Founding members lock $17.99/month or $199/year for as long as they stay subscribed. Everything is included: Balance Sheet and Cashflow across unlimited linked accounts (via Plaid), real-estate values, unlimited voice + text AURA with persistent memory and honest citations, the multi-entity model (trust · LLC · S-Corp), Investments (allocation, asset-location, tax-loss harvesting), Tax (brackets, contributions, K-1, year-end wizard), Equity comp (RSU/ISO/ESPP, AMT planner), net-worth projection (Monte Carlo + scenarios), estate / insurance / education planning, statement & K-1 ingestion, and unlimited household members. CPA / advisor collaboration seats and the auto quarterly review PDF roll out after launch.

Details live on the pricing page.

Not a permanent one. Formation is subscription-only — but every plan starts with a 7-day free trial (a payment method is required to start, and you can cancel anytime before it ends without being charged). It's the safest way to connect your accounts and see whether the depth fits your situation.

Yes. There is no feature ladder to decode — every member gets the entire dashboard: Balance Sheet, Cashflow, unlimited AURA, the multi-entity model, Investments, Tax, Equity comp, projections, estate planning, and ingestion. The only choice is monthly or annual billing.

Founding members who join during the launch window lock the founding price — $199/year or $17.99/month — for as long as their subscription stays active. It never steps up on renewal.

Yes — every plan starts with a 7-day free trial. A payment method is required to start, and you won't be charged if you cancel before the trial ends, which makes it the safest way to see whether Formation fits your situation.

Yes. At list pricing, annual is $349/year versus about $360 paid monthly — about 3% off. During the founding window, annual is $199/year versus about $216 at the founding monthly rate — about 8% off, plus one bill and your founding price locked. You can switch billing cycles anytime from the billing portal, and Stripe prorates the difference.

Yes. Upgrades and downgrades happen in the Stripe billing portal (Profile → Manage subscription) with prorated billing. Monthly plans cancel at the end of the current cycle — you keep access until then. Annual plans prorate the unused months as account credit, or a refund on request within 30 days. Step-by-step instructions are on the support page.

Yes — it's included in the one plan: priority support with concierge onboarding is part of every membership, and a read-only dashboard seat for your CPA or advisor plus an auto quarterly review PDF roll out after launch.

AURA is Formation's built-in AI assistant. Ask about your money the way you'd ask a sharp friend who can see your accounts — by voice or text — and it reads your actual numbers to answer, model scenarios, and surface opportunities. For example:

• "What's my asset allocation across every account?"
• "Where am I overpaying in fund fees?"
• "How much Roth headroom do I have this year?"
• "If the market drops 20%, can I still retire at 55?"

No. AURA is an assistant for education and analysis. It helps you understand your numbers, model scenarios, and explore concepts. It is not a licensed financial adviser and does not provide personalized investment recommendations. For advice tailored to your specific situation, Formation can introduce you to an independent, fee-only partner advisor. Our Terms of Service §3 has the full disclosure.

No — and this is by design. Formation never executes trades or moves money. When AURA suggests a course of action, it can generate a plain-text trade list that you review and execute yourself, at your own broker, on your own time. Any action of $5,000 or more is held behind an explicit "confirm this is what you want" step before a trade list is even produced. You're always the one who pulls the trigger.

Yes — AURA keeps persistent memory across sessions, so it remembers context like your goals, your entities, and what you discussed last time. Unlimited voice + text AURA with persistent memory is included in the one plan.

The underlying AI model has a training-data cutoff and no real-time market feed. AURA is great at analyzing your portfolio, explaining concepts, and running scenarios — but it won't quote today's price or react to this morning's earnings. For live quotes, use the in-app Markets widgets, which pull current data separately.

AURA is included unlimited for both voice and text on the current single plan. If you're on a legacy plan with the metered AURA preview (10 questions per month), you can move to the current plan for unlimited AURA. Manage your plan under Profile → Manage subscription.

Almost always a microphone-permission issue. Click the lock icon next to formationmoney.com in your browser's address bar → set Microphone to Allow → reload the page → tap the orb again.

Voice features require Chrome, Edge, or Safari (Firefox doesn't support the Web Speech API). If you're on a supported browser with mic permission granted and it still won't listen, email us your browser version.

Every figure on the screen carries a small provenance badge that tells you how solid it is at a glance, and you can click any cited number to open a drawer showing exactly where it came from — the account, the record, the formula, the freshness. The four kinds:

• SRCSourced. The number comes straight from a custodian feed, bank connection, or a statement you uploaded. It is the source of truth — an account balance, a holding's value, a dividend.
• CALCCalculated. Computed by a formula from inputs you can see — total net worth (the sum of your accounts), a portfolio's weighted expense ratio, your Roth contribution headroom. A CPA could re-derive it from the same inputs.
• ESTEstimated. Depends on an assumption you didn't enter — a long-term return, a marginal tax rate, a projection horizon. Honest by design: change the assumption and the number changes.
• STALEStale. It was sourced, but the connection hasn't synced recently (usually more than a day). Reconnect or refresh to bring it current.

Anything that looks into the future — a retirement projection, a Monte Carlo success rate, a tax-savings estimate — is labeled EST and carries a one-line methodology note naming the assumptions behind it. On any page that projects or suggests an action, that note also states plainly that it is not a Formation prediction or recommendation. We'd rather show the assumptions than hide them behind a confident-looking number.

If you've connected accounts that don't yet have a long history with us (under about 12 months), Formation synthesizes a backward-looking net-worth curve so your charts aren't empty — and labels it EST so you know it's modeled, not measured. As real balance history accumulates from your connections, the estimated curve is replaced by the real one.

Never. Formation reads and analyzes; it does not transact. The most it will ever do is hand you a trade list to execute yourself. There is no "auto-rebalance," no "auto-harvest," no button that moves a dollar. See the AURA section above for the full no-auto-execution detail.

From the dashboard, click + Add account. We'll show you Plaid Link, which covers 12,000+ US institutions. You authenticate directly with your bank via OAuth or a one-time login through Plaid's secure widget — Formation never sees your bank credentials.

You can still bring the account in: pick Manual account and enter the balance and type, or upload a recent statement (PDF, CSV, OFX/QFX, or image) and we'll parse the balances, transactions, and holdings for you. Manual and uploaded accounts get the same dashboard treatment as linked ones.

Yes. Click + Add account → Manual. You can add cash, investments, real estate, vehicles, equity comp, private positions, crypto, or anything else. Manual accounts roll into net worth, goals, and forecasts just like linked ones.

Yes. Formation accepts PDF, CSV, OFX/QFX, and image (PNG/JPEG) statements up to 10 MB. It reads the institution, balances, transactions, and holdings, then shows you a review screen so you can confirm before anything is added. If an upload conflicts with what's already there — a balance that drifted, a possible duplicate transaction — it surfaces in a reconciliation queue for you to resolve. Formation never overwrites your data without your confirmation.

This usually means your bank invalidated the connection — a password change, a suspicious-login flag, or routine re-authentication. On the account row, click Reconnect and walk through the short update flow (about 30 seconds). If it still won't sync after reconnecting, email us the institution name and we'll dig into the aggregator logs.

All supported:

• Real estate — add a property by address and Formation pulls an automated valuation and rent estimate (with comparables), or enter a value manually.
• Equity comp — track RSUs and options (ISO/NSO), including vesting.
• Private funds / PE — add positions manually and track upcoming capital calls on the capital-call calendar.
• Crypto — via supported exchange connections or as a manual holding.

No to both. You log in to your bank through the aggregator's secure widget — Formation never receives your credentials. And the access we get is read-only: we can see balances and transactions to show them to you, but we cannot move, withdraw, or spend a cent. More in the Security section below.

Every account — linked, manual, or uploaded — rolls into a single net-worth view you can watch over time. If you hold assets across multiple entities (personal, trusts, LLCs, joint accounts), you can group net worth by entity to see who owns what, with unassigned accounts defaulting to "Personal."

Transactions are categorized automatically, recurring bills and income are detected, and for households with lumpy or 1099 income there's variable-income smoothing — it derives a sustainable monthly draw from your real income history instead of pretending every month looks the same.

Your holdings are consolidated across custodians with a true look-through allocation. On top of that:

• Expense-ratio analyzer — finds where you're overpaying in fund fees.
• Asset-location optimizer — flags holdings sitting in the wrong account type (e.g. high-tax-drag bonds in a taxable account) and suggests better placement.
• Capital-call calendar — tracks upcoming private-fund calls so none surprise you.

Formation surfaces tax opportunities and exposure — it does not file returns or give tax advice. It includes:

• A bracket visualizer that shows where your next dollar lands
• Tax-loss harvesting across custodians, with wash-sale awareness
• A backdoor and mega-backdoor Roth tracker, including phase-out and pro-rata-rule warnings
• Multi-state exposure for households that earn or live across state lines
• A guided year-end review wizard

Everything here is designed to be acted on by you, or shared with your CPA.

Set goals and watch how they're funded across all your accounts, then pressure-test them with Monte Carlo scenario stress tests — "If the market drops 20% the year I retire, do I still make it?" Projections are clearly labeled as estimates, with the assumptions visible, and are explicitly not predictions or recommendations.

Add a property by address and Formation pulls an automated valuation (AVM), a rent estimate, and comparable sales, so your real estate is valued with real market data rather than a number you typed once and forgot. Manual values are supported too.

No. Formation is not a tax-filing service and doesn't provide tax advice. It identifies opportunities (harvesting losses, Roth headroom, bracket management) and exposure (multi-state, concentrated positions) so you — or your CPA — can act on them. Think of it as the prep work, not the filing.

Yes — we use the same aggregator (Plaid) that Robinhood, Wealthfront, Betterment, and most other major financial apps use. Specifically:

• You authenticate directly with your bank. Formation never sees your bank password.
• Plaid gives us read-only access — we can't move money.
• Access tokens are stored encrypted on our servers; never logged or exposed in API responses.
• All data in transit is TLS-encrypted; all data at rest is AES-256-encrypted.

The full detail is in our Information Security Policy.

Your data lives in a managed PostgreSQL database (Supabase, hosted on AWS in a US region), encrypted with AES-256. Database row-level security ensures no other Formation user can read your account's data, and access tokens are encrypted and never written to logs.

Yes. You can secure your account with an authenticator app (Google Authenticator, 1Password, Authy, Microsoft Authenticator) or SMS one-time codes, and you can sign in with Google or Apple. Setup lives in Profile → Security; the support page has the walkthrough.

Row-level security isolates your data at the database layer, so it isn't casually browsable. We access account data only as needed to operate the product and help you when you ask — never to sell or market. You can also hide specific accounts from AURA entirely, so they never enter the AI's context. We never sell or share your financial data (see Data & privacy).

No. We don't sell, rent, or share your financial data for advertising or marketing. Ever. Your data is shared only with the service providers we need to operate Formation (Plaid, Stripe, Supabase, Anthropic, and similar) — each constrained by its own privacy policy. Full list in our Privacy Policy §7.

When you ask AURA a question, we include a contextual summary of your finances (balances, recent spending patterns) so the answer is relevant, and that summary is sent to Anthropic's API to generate the response. Anthropic does not use API inputs for training. We don't send your full transaction history or unnecessary personal information. And you can hide specific accounts from AURA in Settings → Household — hidden accounts never enter the AI's context, on the client or the server.

Yes. A full JSON export of your data is available at any time, before or after you cancel — your numbers are yours to take with you.

When you cancel, there's a 30-day soft-delete window — your data is recoverable if you change your mind. After that it's permanently purged. If you delete your account outright (Profile → Danger Zone), linked-account access tokens are revoked at the aggregator immediately, and everything is removed within 30 days, including backups on the next cycle. Details in our Data Retention Policy.

Yes. Formation can introduce paid-plan users to an independent, fee-only partner advisor for a no-obligation intro call — open Household → Professional team in the dashboard. Advisors are independent third parties, not employed by Formation, and Formation is not a registered investment adviser; our Terms of Service §9 has the full relationship disclosure.

You can export a full JSON or PDF of your data at any time to hand to a professional. Deeper collaboration — an auto quarterly review PDF and a read-only advisor seat — rolls out after launch, included in the plan.

No. Formation is not a registered investment adviser. The app is a financial-data and analysis platform — AURA provides education and analysis, not personalized investment advice, and Formation never manages money or places trades. Any partner advisor we introduce you to is an independent licensed professional who carries their own regulatory registrations and disclosures.

On the sign-in page, click Forgot password?, enter your email, and we'll send a reset link (good for 1 hour). It comes from info@formationmoney.com — check spam if you don't see it.

Go to Profile → Manage subscription to open the Stripe billing portal and cancel. By default, cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period — you keep access until then and you're not charged again. You can reactivate from the same portal anytime.

Same place — Profile → Manage subscription → Stripe billing portal. Update your card, or change plans (Stripe shows the prorated difference and applies it as a credit). Stripe handles all card data; Formation never sees your card number, expiration, or CVC.

At checkout, click Add promotion code below the price summary on the Stripe Checkout page and enter your code (codes are case-insensitive). If it says "invalid," it may have expired or hit its redemption limit — email us if you think it should still work.

We use Stripe Tax to apply the right rate based on where you live. In most US states, software subscriptions like Formation aren't taxable; in a handful (NY, TX, PA, OH, CT, WA, and a few others) they are. You'll see the tax line on every receipt.

Email changes are handled manually for now — email info@formationmoney.com from your current address with the new one. To delete your account, go to Profile → Danger Zone → Delete Account; see Data & privacy for what happens to your data.

Formation is built by a small team (Formation Money LLC) in Colorado. Small enough that we answer every support message ourselves — usually within a business day.

Today, Formation supports US-based financial institutions and US users only. International support (Canada, UK, EU) is on the roadmap but not actively being built yet. If you're outside the US and want to be notified when it's available, drop us a line and we'll add you to the list.

No. Formation is not a bank, broker, or custodian. It never holds, moves, or has spending access to your money — it reads your accounts (read-only) to show you the picture and help you make sense of it.

We'd genuinely love to hear it. Email info@formationmoney.com — for bugs, include a screenshot, the URL, and what you were trying to do; for feature requests, tell us what you're trying to accomplish and what's in the way today. We read every one.

Email info@formationmoney.com. We're a small team and we answer ourselves — most replies arrive within a business day, Monday through Friday.