Frequently Asked Questions

Elenvo is an AI financial planning platform built around six pillars: cash flow, your Financial Health Score, the retirement gap, goals, family protection and smart alerts. You connect the accounts you want it to read and fill in what it cannot see, and Ellie — the assistant inside the product — turns that into one 0-100 score plus ranked, plain-English next steps. Elenvo never holds or moves your money; every step is one you carry out at your own institution.

Onboarding is a short wizard rather than a long intake form. You pick the areas you care about — retirement, cash flow, education or insurance — then enter your basics (name, age, and state or province), then handle cash flow either by linking a bank through Plaid or by typing your monthly income and spending, and finally list any assets and debts. The cash-flow and assets steps can both be deferred and completed later in Settings; the dimensions they feed simply stay locked until you do.

No. Elenvo is a technology platform — not a registered investment adviser with the SEC or any state securities regulator, not a broker-dealer registered with FINRA, not a bank, and not a tax preparation service. What it produces is educational information and technology-assisted planning, not personalized investment, tax or legal advice. Elenvo does connect you with licensed human advisors, and booking a consultation with one is part of the paid product.

No. The 401(k) rollover flow is one route inside the retirement pillar. Your Financial Health Score, cash-flow tracking, budgets, savings and debt-payoff goals, the monthly allocation plan and the family-protection analysis all work without one. If you do have a plan sitting at a former employer, the rollover intake and the rollover guides in our journal are there when you want them.

It is a single 0-100 number summarizing six dimensions of your finances: retirement, emergency reserve, debt, cash flow, family protection and tax. Each dimension is graded 0-100 on its own evidence, multiplied by a fixed weight, and the six results are added and rounded. The weights are the same for every household, so the same inputs always produce the same number.

As a weighted average of six dimensions: retirement, emergency reserve, debt, cash flow, family protection and tax. Each is graded 0-100 on its own evidence, then multiplied by a fixed weight; the six products are added and rounded to give the score. The weights are the same for every household and are never re-normalized, so a dimension with no data scores zero and keeps its share of the total rather than dropping out of it. Our methodology page explains how the score is built — the individual weights are product internals and are not published.

Because a dimension we cannot measure yet scores 0 and keeps its full weight instead of dropping out of the average. That is deliberate: re-weighting around a gap would hide the gap. A new account with nothing linked can therefore sit in the red, and each dimension card names the exact piece of data that would unlock its points.

It follows your data rather than a schedule. The inputs behind the score are fingerprinted, so the moment any of them moves — a fresh batch of transactions, an edited debt balance, a completed coverage conversation — the next load recomputes the score instead of serving the stored snapshot.

Savings targets and debt payoffs. A savings goal has a target amount and an optional target date — an emergency fund, a house deposit, a trip, this year's IRA contribution; a payoff goal is linked to one of your debts and tracks the balance down. Elenvo also proposes goals from what it already knows about you, including an emergency fund sized at three months of expenses, an IRA goal set to the current annual limit, an education goal and a goal for the retirement or coverage gap it found.

Allocate turns leftover cash into a monthly plan. It works on the last completed calendar month — the one whose cash flow is fully observed — calculates what was left after income and spending, and proposes how to split it across your active goals by priority. Nothing happens until you apply the plan, and applying it records contributions against each goal; it does not instruct your bank, because Elenvo cannot move money.

A budget is a monthly limit on one spending category, or on a single subcategory inside it, measured against your real categorized transactions rather than an estimate. You can include or exclude individual transactions when the automatic match gets it wrong, step back through up to 24 months of history, and a smart alert fires when a category goes over its limit.

Ellie is the AI assistant built into Elenvo. It reads the accounts you connect plus the details you enter, produces the Financial Health Score and the ranked next steps behind it, and answers questions in ordinary language on the Ask Ellie screen. Goals and My Money Overview also have assistant panels: describe the change you want and Ellie proposes it, item by item, with nothing saved until you confirm each one.

No. Bank connections run through Plaid and are read-only: Elenvo receives balances and transaction data, never your bank login credentials, and it cannot move funds, place trades or open accounts on your behalf. Every step Ellie recommends is one you carry out yourself, at your own institution.

No, and it is not built to. AI output can contain errors, rest on incomplete information, or miss context only a person would catch, so Elenvo asks you to verify its recommendations independently and to consult a qualified professional before acting. The licensed-advisor consultations in the app exist for exactly that.

It grades your coverage across seven lines — life, health, disability, auto, home, long-term care and umbrella liability — through a guided conversation instead of a form, and you can photograph a policy or loan statement to have the details read out for you to confirm. Lines that do not apply to you are left out rather than scored against you, and the result feeds the family-protection dimension of your Financial Health Score. Coverage is sized with standard methods such as DIME and income multiples, both defined in our glossary.

No. Elenvo does not sell securities or insurance policies and takes no commission — the subscription is the only thing it is paid, so nothing in a coverage recommendation depends on what you end up buying. If you decide to act on one, Elenvo can connect you with licensed agents and advisors.

A 401(k) rollover is moving funds from your employer-sponsored 401(k) to another retirement account, typically an IRA (Individual Retirement Account). This commonly happens when you change jobs, retire, or want more control over your retirement investments.

A direct rollover transfers funds directly from your 401(k) to your new IRA without the money passing through your hands. An indirect rollover sends you a check, which you must deposit into your new IRA within 60 days to avoid taxes and penalties. Direct rollovers are simpler and avoid potential tax issues.

If you roll over from a Traditional 401(k) to a Traditional IRA, there are no immediate taxes. Rolling over to a Roth IRA is a taxable event because you're converting from pre-tax to after-tax money. The plan Elenvo generates walks through the tax implications specific to your situation.

Yes, but rolling over from a Traditional 401(k) to a Roth IRA is a taxable conversion. You'll pay income tax on the amount converted in the year you roll over. This can make sense if you expect higher tax rates in retirement or want tax-free withdrawals later.

A typical direct rollover takes 2-4 weeks. The timeline depends on your old 401(k) plan administrator's processing speed and your new IRA provider. Some plans may take longer. Your generated plan includes a step-by-step action list so you can track where you are in the process.

Because it is what turns estimates into measurements. Linked accounts supply the transactions behind your cash-flow view, your budgets and their alerts, the balances behind the emergency-reserve and debt dimensions of your score, the leftover cash Allocate splits across your goals, and the monthly debt-balance updates. Linking stays optional — you can type your monthly income and spending by hand instead — but anything that needs transaction-level data stays estimated or locked until something feeds it.

Yes. Plaid is used by thousands of financial apps including Venmo, Robinhood, and Betterment. Plaid uses bank-level encryption and never stores your bank login credentials. Elenvo only receives read-only access to balance and transaction data — we cannot move money or access your login credentials.

Yes. Unlinking is one click on the Settings page, at any time. Disconnecting deletes that account's synced transactions along with it, and the dimensions that depended on them fall back to whatever you entered by hand.

All data is encrypted in transit with modern TLS (1.2 and 1.3) and at rest with AES-256. Your information is hosted on SOC 2 Type II audited infrastructure (Supabase/AWS) — that audit covers the hosting layer, and Elenvo does not hold its own report. We never store your bank login credentials: bank connections go through Plaid, and card payments run through PCI DSS Level 1 certified Stripe, so card details never reach Elenvo servers.

Only what the product needs: the age, location, income, retirement balances, goals, assets, debts and coverage details you enter, plus read-only balance and transaction data from any accounts you link. That bank data is not confined to one screen — it feeds your cash-flow view, budgets, debt tracking, the allocation plan and several dimensions of your Financial Health Score. You choose what to share and can remove any of it later.

Yes. You can export your plan data at any time and request account deletion from Settings. Deletion is scheduled seven days out so an accidental request can be reversed, after which your account and its data are permanently erased. Individual pieces go sooner: unlinking a bank removes its transactions immediately.

Elenvo charges a subscription and nothing else: no hidden fees, no commissions, and no financial products for sale. Our pricing page lists the current price of every plan, and states whether a free trial is being offered right now and how long it runs — both are read from the same records the checkout charges and the paywall enforces, so the number on the card is the number that reaches your statement.

Pro is the whole product: the Financial Health Score, unlimited account linking, the monthly cash-flow summary, insights and unlimited plans from Ellie, the full gap analysis, tax optimization across all shelters, and smart alerts and deadlines. Pro + Advisor — which adds licensed advisor reviews, a quarterly portfolio check-in and white-glove onboarding — is announced but not on sale yet: there is no checkout behind it, so its card reads "Coming soon" and its button goes to our contact form. There is no permanent free tier. When a free trial is on offer it opens the same capabilities as Pro for a fixed number of days rather than a cut-down version of them, and the pricing page states the current terms.

Yes. Every paid plan carries a 30-day money-back guarantee, and the Terms of Service carry the same commitment, so it is a contractual promise rather than a marketing line. Contact us within 30 days of the charge for a full refund. Cancelling is one click on the Subscription tab in Settings and takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for.