Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy explains how Lodestar Wealth (“Lodestar,” “we,” “us”) collects, uses, shares, and protects information when you use LodestarWealth.io and related applications (the “Service”). By using the Service, you agree to this Policy and to our Terms & Conditions.

1. Information We Collect

This section says the same thing twice on purpose. First in plain English, which is how you will actually want to read it. Then in the statutory category format California and several other states use, which is how a regulator or a lawyer will want to read it. Neither version holds anything the other leaves out.

1.1 In Plain English

• Account information — such as your email address when you sign up (including via Google sign-in) and the display name you choose.
• Profile details you choose to provide — age, annual income, occupation, job title, city and state, marital status, gender, number of dependents, and the goals you write in your own words. These are optional; leaving them blank only makes your analysis less specific, and you can edit or clear any of them on the Profile page.
• Profile photo, if you upload one — stored with our hosting provider in a public storage bucket and served from a public web address that contains your account identifier. Anyone who has that address can open the image, so treat an avatar as public. Section 5 explains what happens to the stored image when you delete your account.
• Financial information you provide — figures you enter manually, and statements you upload. We parse an uploaded statement to extract your account details, balances, holdings, and individual transactions (including dates, descriptions, and merchant names), and we keep those extracted records so your dashboard, history, budgets, and spending analysis work over time. The uploaded file itself is discarded once parsed — we do not keep the original document. You can delete any stored account and its transactions from the Accounts page, and deleting your Lodestar account removes these records, with the narrow exceptions listed in section 5.
• Bank-connection data (via Plaid) — if you connect an account, Plaid handles your bank login. We never receive or store your bank credentials. We store an encrypted access token plus the account balances, transactions, loan and credit-card details, and investment holdings needed to power your diagnostics, and we refresh connected accounts automatically each night so your dashboard and alerts stay current. You can disconnect any bank at any time from the Accounts page — that revokes our access at Plaid immediately and deletes the connection, though data already synced stays on your dashboard until you delete those accounts too. If you do not sign in for 150 days we email you a warning, and at 180 days we revoke and delete your bank connections for you. Plaid also handles your information under its own end user privacy policy.
• Payment information — handled by our payment processor (Stripe). We do not store full payment-card numbers. We do keep the identifiers Stripe gives us for your customer and subscription records, and a card fingerprint — a token Stripe derives from your card, not the number itself — which we use to keep the free trial and referral credit to one per person.
• Content you create in the app — your Chat With Lodestar conversations (your questions and our answers), and any feedback, correction, or question you send us from a result, which we store alongside the figures that were on screen so the comment makes sense when we read it.
• Questions you ask in the site chat — including before you have an account. We keep your question and the answer we gave, and we read them to decide what to build and explain next. Please do not put personal financial details into the public site chat.
• Usage, device, and log data — including IP address, browser/user-agent, pages viewed, product events, and error diagnostics, collected through our analytics and monitoring providers and our own audit log. When you are signed in, we also send our analytics provider your account identifier and email address so your activity is attributed to one person across devices.

1.2 By Statutory Category

California’s privacy law describes personal information by category. The table below maps every category in Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.140(v) and (ae) to the specific data we collect in it, why we collect it, the kinds of third parties it goes to, and how long we keep it. Categories we do not collect are listed as Not collected rather than left out, so you can see the whole list and confirm the gaps are deliberate. The third parties are named individually in section 4.

Two things in that table are easy to assume the other way round, so we will say them straight. We do not store your bank account numbers — when you reconnect a bank, a masked account number is read from your bank in memory purely so we can recognize it as the same login and not duplicate it, and it is never written to our database. And we never use or disclose sensitive personal information to infer characteristics about you — it does one job each: keeping your linked accounts current, and computing your HSA headroom. Statutorily, only those two items count as sensitive personal information. We handle your whole financial picture — balances, holdings, transactions — with the same care regardless, because the legal label is a floor, not a description of what matters to you.

2. How We Use Information

• to provide, operate, secure, and improve the Service;
• to generate your diagnostics, action plans, forecasts, and simulations;
• to keep a record of the analyses we ran and the recommendations we made, so your history, trends, and progress tracking work — and so we can measure and improve the engine behind them;
• to process payments and manage your subscription;
• to communicate with you (e.g., service messages, and our newsletter if you opt in);
• to detect, prevent, and respond to fraud, abuse, and security incidents — including keeping the one-per-person free trial and referral credit from being reused; and
• to comply with legal obligations.

3. AI Processing & Your Numbers

We use Anthropic’s Claude models to parse the statements you upload, to phrase and rank the recommendations our engine computes, to write your portfolio review and market brief, and to answer your questions in chat and in the site chat. Depending on the feature, what we send can include the uploaded statement file, your balances and cash-flow figures, your top spending categories and merchants, the names of the securities you hold and the account each one sits in, the profile details and goals you entered, and the messages you write. We do not send your password, your bank credentials, or your payment-card details — we never hold the first two, and the third stays with Stripe.

The model does not invent or alter your financial figures — every dollar amount comes from our deterministic calculation engine using your data. We do not sell your data, we do not permit your personal financial data to be used to train third-party models, and we do not use it to train models of our own. If that ever changes, we will ask for your permission first.

4. How We Share Information

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising — we have not done either in the preceding 12 months. We share it only with service providers (“subprocessors”) who process it on our behalf under contract, and only as needed to run the Service:

• Supabase — database, authentication, file storage, and hosting of stored data;
• Vercel — application hosting and delivery;
• Plaid — secure bank-account connectivity;
• Stripe — payment processing;
• Anthropic — AI statement parsing, recommendation phrasing and ranking, portfolio reviews, the market brief, and chat answers (see section 3 for what we send);
• Resend — transactional and newsletter email;
• Sentry — error monitoring;
• PostHog — product analytics, which receives your account identifier and email address; and
• Alpha Vantage — market quotes and news for the market brief. We send ticker symbols only, deduplicated across everyone receiving that day’s brief; we never send your name, email, balances, share counts, or account details.

We may also disclose information if required by law, to enforce our Terms, or in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets (with notice where required).

Separately, anything you publish through a share link is public by design. When you share a forecast or a portfolio review, we store the figures you chose to publish — which can include your net worth, assets and liabilities, monthly cash flow, health score, top spending categories, and the names of securities you hold — and serve them at an unguessable public web address to anyone who has the link. We never include your name, email address, or login details in a share.

5. Data Retention

We keep your information for as long as your account is active or as needed to provide the Service and meet legal obligations. Raw uploaded statements are discarded after processing; the financial records extracted from them are retained while your account is active, so your history, trends, and budgets stay available — you can delete stored accounts and their transactions at any time from the Accounts page. Security and audit-log records may be retained separately to preserve an accurate security trail. When you delete your account, we delete or de-identify associated personal data, except where we are required or permitted to retain it by law.

Three things outlive account deletion, and we would rather say so plainly than leave you to find out:

• Share links you published — a shared forecast or portfolio review stays live at its public address after you delete your account. We unlink it from your account, so the page carries no name, email, or account identifier, but the figures you chose to publish remain. There is currently no self-service way to revoke a share link — we know this is a gap and intend to close it. Until we do, email us and we will take any link down.
• A free-trial record — if you ever trialed or subscribed, we keep a one-way hash of your email address and the Stripe card fingerprint after deletion so the one-per-person free trial cannot be reused. Neither can be reversed to recover your email address or card number, and we use them for nothing else.
• A profile photo you uploaded — deleting your account does not yet remove the stored image file from our hosting provider, and its public address stays reachable. Email us and we will delete it; we are working on making this automatic.

6. Security

We use industry-standard safeguards, including encryption in transit (TLS), encryption of sensitive tokens at rest, row-level access controls, and least-privilege access. No method of transmission or storage is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

7. Your Rights & Choices

California’s CCPA/CPRA and the comprehensive privacy laws of Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, and a growing list of other states give residents the rights below. We extend every one of them to everyone who uses Lodestar, wherever you live — checking your address before deciding whether you get to delete your own data is not a product we want to run.

7.1 The Rights You Have

• Know and access — what personal information we have collected about you, the categories it falls into, where it came from, why we collected it, and the categories of third parties we disclosed it to. Section 1.2 answers most of this in advance; ask us and we will answer it for your specific account.
• Delete — your personal information, subject only to the narrow exceptions in section 5 and to what we are required or permitted to keep by law.
• Correct — inaccurate personal information. Most of it you can fix yourself on the Profile and Accounts pages; email us for anything you cannot reach.
• Obtain a copy — your data in a portable, machine-readable form you can take elsewhere.
• Opt out of sale or sharing — we do not sell your personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising or targeted advertising, and we have not done either in the preceding 12 months. There are no advertising pixels, ad-network tags, or data brokers on this site to opt out of. If that ever changes, the opt-out ships before the change does.
• Limit the use of sensitive personal information — the two narrow items in section 1.2 are used only to deliver what you asked for and to run and secure the Service, which is the use state law already exempts from this right, and never to infer characteristics about you. In practice there is nothing here to limit. You can still disconnect a bank at any time from the Accounts page, and clear your Tax Center entries, which removes both.
• Opt out of profiling — Lodestar makes no automated decision about you that produces a legal or similarly significant effect. We make no credit, insurance, employment, housing, or eligibility decisions. Our engine produces educational output; what you do with it is your call.
• Withdraw consent — unsubscribe from marketing email at any time via the link in those emails or from the Profile page, and turn off alert digests there too.
• Non-discrimination — we will not deny you the Service, charge you a different price, give you a lower quality of service, or retaliate in any way because you exercised a privacy right. We offer no financial incentive in exchange for your data.

7.2 How To Exercise Them

You can do most of it yourself, right now, without asking us: delete individual saved analyses and portfolio reviews, delete chat conversations, disconnect a linked bank, delete stored accounts and their transactions, edit or clear your profile details, and delete your entire account — all directly in the app.

For anything you cannot do in the app, email us at contact@lodestarwealth.io. We operate exclusively online, so email is how we take these requests — it reaches us directly and we can verify it against your account. We do not yet offer a one-click download of your data — ask us for a copy and we will assemble it by hand and send it to you.

We verify a request by matching it to the email address on the account, and for a deletion or a copy we may ask you to confirm it from a signed-in session. We ask for no more information than we need to be confident it is you, and anything you send for verification is used for verification only and then discarded. We respond within 45 days, and may extend once by a further 45 days if we tell you why before the first period runs out. Exercising these rights is free.

7.3 Authorized Agents

You may use an authorized agent to submit a request for you. The agent must give us written permission signed by you, and we may still ask you to verify your own identity with us directly or to confirm that you gave the agent permission. An agent acting under a valid power of attorney does not need the separate written permission.

7.4 If We Say No — Your Right To Appeal

If we deny a request, we will tell you why. You may appeal by replying to our decision, or by emailing us with “Appeal” in the subject line. Colorado, Connecticut, and Virginia require this path; we offer it to everyone. We will respond to an appeal within 45 days with a written explanation of the decision, and if we still deny it we will give you the contact details and complaint process for your state Attorney General so you can take it further.

8. Cookies & Analytics

We use essential cookies to operate the Service and analytics tools to understand usage and improve the product. We run no advertising cookies, ad-network tags, or tracking pixels — there is no third party watching you here to sell you something. You can control cookies through your browser settings; disabling some cookies may affect functionality.

9. Children’s Privacy

The Service is not directed to anyone under 18, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe a child has provided us information, contact us and we will delete it.

10. International Users

The Service is operated in the United States. If you access it from outside the U.S., you understand your information will be processed in the U.S., where data-protection laws may differ from those in your jurisdiction.

11. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Policy from time to time. Material changes will be reflected by updating the “Last updated” date above and, where appropriate, by additional notice.

12. Contact

Questions about your privacy? Contact us at contact@lodestarwealth.io. Lodestar Wealth, LLC is organized in Pennsylvania, with its registered office at 502 W 7th St, Ste 100, Erie, PA 16502. For what we share and what you can limit, see our Financial Privacy Notice.