GuidelineReviews of guideline.com

Hi , The basic capability of reallocating (selling+buying) money from a specific fund (e. g. a money market fund) to specific other fund(s) on ad hoc basis without changing all future allocations is not available - this is unbelievable, but I called Guideline support and confirmed it a few days ago. Every 401K management company I’ve used through multiple employers in the last 20+ years had this basic capability.

- Fees are opaque, and seem high. - Doesn't allow a reasonably long connection to external services.

Guideline is very basic in its abilities to actually track and monitor your investments over time. It will show you the all-time change, but doesn't really have any graphs, quarterly breakdown, or YTD dashboards. The participant fees are higher than some of its competitors and and functionality is pretty limited.

Not enough investing options

We experienced an abundance of issues with the onboarding process, including the improper setup/sync with our QuickBooks account. When attempting to resolve the technical issues, we received very poor customer service, to the point where we had to directly involve our investment manager just to get the attention of someone at Guideline. Our issues persisted for several months before they were finally resolved.

Limited investment choices. No option to limit rebalance of a portfolio for future investments only. Tone deaf management ignores customer requests for better rebalancing options.

Bottom Line Up Front: It's cheap, but you get what you pay for. Pros: -Easy setup/administration -Streamlined 360 integration with Gusto -Very low maintenance as both a participant and plan sponsor -Shakeup of pricing from 2 tiers to 3 tiers was convenient and solved some cost structure issues. Cons: -No customization of the fund selection, which means there are some funds in the plan lineup that fail the Fiduciary Scoring test. -Support is very slow (1-2 weeks for response, 3-6 weeks for resolution) -Performance reporting is... lacking. Transparency is very low, and the figures sometimes don't make sense (i.e. 3.46% return on a fund that did 20%+ over the prior year.) -Adoption of a 0.08% basis point fee to cover "transactional fees which were often complained about" is an obvious lie. Almost all of the transactional fees were rare one time events (Rollovers, loans, QDROs, plan terminations) that cost less than $100/year (And don't HAVE to cost anything since they're all automated), whereas paying 0.08% basis points will bring in millions of dollars in revenue to Guideline every single year.

Lately, the service and response time has become slow and subpar.