Frequently Asked Questions

What is Carefull?

Carefull is the first service designed for financial caregiving for a loved one. Our mobile app helps you protect your parent’s financial accounts by monitoring them for possible late or missed payments, changes in spending patterns or behavior, unusual transactions or signs of fraud.

The app also simplifies the sometimes-tricky communication and transparency needed within families, offering timely advice and helping you coordinate with other family members who are involved with your parents’ care.

How does it work?

Get started by creating an account for yourself in the Carefull mobile app. Then, securely connect your loved one’s financial accounts in the app to enable alerts, monitoring and analysis.

Carefull then learns your loved one’s unique spending, bill schedule and account balance patterns and automatically reviews your loved one’s transactions to ensure that nothing unusual is occurring — no late bill payments, payments involving strange people or places, changes in spending patterns, and more. If it catches anything fishy, it will send alerts to your email and phone.

Carefull will also enable you to see all of your loved one’s bills in one place and give you the ability to see which bills have been paid, which may be late and which are upcoming.

You have the option to invite your loved one or other family members into the app if they ordinarily participate in conversations about financial matters (although you don't have to). Then, when an issue arises, you can share and collaborate within the app, and your “Circle” is there to help resolve it.

Lastly, taking care of someone else’s finances can often leave people feeling that they “don’t know what they don’t know.” Our experts have written educational guides and tips about topics like how to protect your loved one from fraud, how to help them save money and how to ensure that you’re prepared for whatever happens as they age.
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You can learn more about how Carefull works and see screenshots of the app by visiting our How It Works page.

How long does it take to set up Carefull?

The Carefull setup process is quick and painless. You can create an account and connect a loved one’s financial accounts in a matter of minutes and start receiving alerts immediately.

Who is Carefull for?

We built Carefull for “financial caregivers” — anyone who helps manage someone else’s money, whether that be a parent, relative, friend or professional client. Some people manage this set of tasks completely on their own, and some people collaborate with other family members or professionals. Access to Carefull can be granted to any trusted person in your loved one’s “Circle” of support.

What types of “alerts” will I receive from Carefull?

Carefull pulls together insights and alerts from all of your loved one’s connected financial accounts and brings the most urgent ones to your attention. You'll receive alerts about financial issues like:

Changes in spending patterns
Unusual transfer types / withdrawals
Unusual transfer payees
Unusual cash usage
Unknown or unusual merchants
Late bills and payments
Large or unusual transactions
Duplicate transactions
Unusual balances or balance patterns
Unusual transaction locations
Recurring charitable donations
Irregular and unexpected fees

How is Carefull different from the alerts I already receive from my bank?

Unlike a bank, Carefull is designed with the day-to-day activities of financial caregivers in mind. We’ll alert you to issues that a bank won’t catch, but which can be common to seniors and those who suffer from memory loss —a late or missed bill payment, an accidental duplicate payment to the electric company, a charitable donation that was accidentally set to be paid monthly instead of one-time.

But on top of that, we’ll enable you to resolve that issue, communicate it with anyone else who needs to be in the know, and help you ensure that similar issues won’t happen again.

Will my loved one have to sign up for Carefull as well?

Caregiving situations vary widely. It’s not necessary for your loved one to use the Carefull service themselves. If they are typically involved in communication or day-to-day efforts surrounding their finances, it would be advisable to include them, but how the service is used is up to each individual family.

What if I don’t have my loved one’s account information handy?

In order to start using Carefull, you’ll need to have login information for at least one of your loved one’s accounts.

If you haven’t yet started to manage your parent’s finances but feel that it’s time to get started, we’ve compiled a checklist for talking to your parents about their finances.

If you find yourself suddenly responsible for your parent’s finances due to a sudden health matter or death of a parent, you may have to do some detective work to find their account information. To help you get started, check out our guide to piecing together your parent's financial picture.

Once you’ve found what you need, you may want to start a physical list of the usernames and passwords for the accounts by printing out an organizer or set up an online password manager.

How much does Carefull cost?

You can get started with Carefull for free for a 30 day free trial period. After your free trial, Carefull costs $9.99 per month with an annual subscription ($119.99 annually), or $12.99 with a monthly subscription.

Is Carefull secure? Can I trust Carefull with my loved one’s financial information?

We understand that being a financial caregiver means maintaining a sacred trust. We believe our duty to you and your family is the same. That’s why we take security seriously and, from our very beginning, have worked to ensure your data is and will always be safe and secure.

Carefull will never have access to any of your loved one’s financial account login or password information. That information is all managed through our partnership with Plaid — a company that enables us to connect to your financial accounts. Plaid is used by most banks and personal finance management applications in the US—including Venmo, Chime and Betterment—to allow you to connect accounts from other financial institutions. You can read more about Plaid here.

Importantly, Carefull maintains read-only access to your data. We use your data to provide insights and analysis only. The access you grant us does not allow money movement in any form.

Additionally, Carefull secures your loved one’s financial data in a variety of ways:

Encryption: Our application uses bank-level 256-bit encryption to store and transmit your data over the internet.
Multi Factor Authentication: We verify your account with a unique code sent only to your mobile device.
Biometrics: You can optionally enable the biometric security on your device so that each session with the Carefull app can be secured with your face or fingerprint.

Lastly, Carefull will never sell your data. We use it only to provide our services to you.

You can read more about Carefull’s security policy here, or review our full Terms of Service here.

Does Carefull store my loved one’s bank account information?

Carefull will never have access to any of your loved one’s financial account login or password information. That information is all managed through our partnership with Plaid — a company that enables us to connect to your financial accounts. Plaid is used by most banks and personal finance management applications in the US—including Venmo, Chime and Betterment—to allow you to connect accounts from other financial institutions. You can read more about Plaid here.

What if my loved one doesn’t want to share their financial information with me?

Money is a sensitive topic, and it can get especially complicated within families. If you feel that your loved one could benefit from additional support and monitoring of their finances, but they are reluctant to share their information with you, your first step should be to have a conversation with them.
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Keep in mind that getting your parents to become comfortable with the idea of discussing their finances with you can take time. We’ve developed some tips to help you get started with that conversation, which you can find here.

What if my loved one has accounts that I don’t know about?

Carefull can only monitor accounts that are connected within the app, so if your loved one is spending money or paying bills through financial accounts that you are unaware of, they will not appear within your Carefull account.

If you’re nervous that your loved one has accounts you (and they) don’t know or may have forgotten about, check out our guide to piecing together your parent's financial picture.

Can I access my Carefull account from my computer?

Today, Carefull is only available on iPhone and Android devices, but we plan to have it available for desktop computers soon. If you’d like us to keep in touch with you, feel free to drop us an email at hello@getcarefull.com

Who is the team behind Carefull?

Carefull was founded in 2019 by Max Goldman and Todd Rovak, two veterans of the technology and financial services industries. Max has worked in technology venture capital, managed products at Google and started up three other companies. Directr, his most recent company, was acquired by YouTube. Prior to his role at Carefull, Todd was the CEO of Fahrenheit 212, an innovation consultancy based in New York City that was acquired by Capgemini. You can read more about our founding story on our About Us page.

Carefull is based in New York City and has an engineering office in Montreal.

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