GuidelineReviews of guideline.com

Just completely and absolutely awful. They so slow. They take more than a week to service a loan payoff that should only have taken a day. It is still not done in the system. At other companies you could have paid off the loan, obtained another loan and had the funds delivered by this time. There is no reason for this to take this long. And the customer service has been nice, but they only have generic answers and don't actually do anything to help. Not to mention, on paying off the loan, it took 4 days to even get a payoff balance. This is absolutely the worst 401K service out there. And they are cheap to use for a small business but I suppose you get what you pay for. I wish I could rate it zero stars.

Just awful to deal with. Our startup of 4 employees went out of business, and more than a year later they're still charging us even though we've told them to cancel every single month. We haven't had a contribution for 16 months, but they just give excuses why they have to charge (distribution confirmations, etc., etc.). They SUCK.

Scheduled employee contributions continuously not going through when scheduled. No response from company, no one knows what's going on. We signed up in January, it's been nothing but a disorganized cluster from the beginning.

Slower than watching a tree grow.

@Guideline product team. I understand that you all are at 4 years in business and really appreciate your product because it is probably the best option for small business. That said, to get this rating up I would need to see a significant product change around rebalancing. Every other 401K I have used takes the allocation that you select and splits your contribution. Once in the account the allocations do not change unless you go in and manually change them. You should move to this model. By "rebalancing" the account you are lowering the upside during a good market and increasing the downside during the bad market. Also, when rebalancing you cannot update your portfolio allocation so you are stuck with investments that are going down. Likely a big reason this hasn't been an issue is because at a 5% rate of change to rebalance this didn't happen often. In a market where we are seeing 5-10% swings almost daily this is exacerbating the problem. I've read other reviews from people who noticed the same in a good market that were also negative. Happy to talk further if needed. Edit: After further conversations I'm even more unimpressed with the organization as a whole. My favorite part was when you all incorrectly quoted the IRS and then admitted that what was quoted as an IRS policy was actually a Guideline policy. Before I understood that it was a new product with some hickups during a bad market. Now I honestly don't trust the organization.

Stay away! They have this "portfolio" business that take away your ability to control your finances. Basically, if the market does well, you lose out because (as I understand it) they will sell anything you make over some threshold.

Guideline charges ridiculous fees for a rollover ($50) and traps your residual dividends in the account (if that doesn't add up to $50). They're claiming to be "low-cost" but charge you $50 to issue a check when it would cost cents to transfer money via ACH. Plus they charge $5+/month to continue holding your assets there when you leave your employer. Don't believe their startup marketing crap and find another provider.

I am tried to leave Guideline because they are clearly a shady organization. The starter emails with a large "Enroll Now" button followed by the fine print of "if you do not take action by this deadline, you will automatically be enrolled..." is not okay. "A large "Enroll Now" button implies that you (the user) have to take action or nothing happens (which is what I did). I am an ux designer for a living and I can tell other reviewers that this is a very intentionally shady set up. In addition to the misleading marketing, their customer service team is poorly informed and very unhelpful. I was originally told by a representative that I made an account and even changed my email (which I never did) but when I asked if they could un-enroll me from your services, they backtracked, saying I didn't have an account from which they could un-enroll me. How is it possible that they've been taking my money for the past year, from an account that doesn't exist?? I only noticed anything when I received my W2 and realized that they have been taking 400 a month from my paychecks each month. Again, how or who determines the amount since I apparently didn't have an account set up?? The poor customer service, coupled with the misleading and unethical marketing schemes is why I will no longer be using Guideline and why I will urge my company to do the same.