Issue connecting two logins with Vanguard (edited)

Hey folks,

I previously posted a workaround where in the web app I was able to connect my Vanguard account using the personal investor Vanguard site, and in the mobile app (iOS) I was able to connect my wife's Vanguard account using the retirement plans Vanguard site (which has a different URL). I specifically had to use these two versions of Simplifi, and the two different login URLs, or it did not work.

When I logged in to Simplifi today, I was disappointed to see that yet again, all my/our Vanguard accounts were broken. I did this same workaround successfully, though I did have to "reset" all the accounts rather than just refreshing the connection. I also had to override the app's assumption that they were all new accounts and had to point them to the existing accounts to link.

Has any one had problems with workaround using Vanguard Small Business? It is now saying that the accounts have to be reconnected, but when I try to do that, it won't reconnect the accounts.

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My two Vanguard accounts that I had in Simplifi for at least a year now kept disconnecting. I finally sat down to try and resolve it, and now things are far, far worse. I am experiencing the same problem everyone else is: Simplifi will not keep the two Vanguard accounts separate. No matter what incantation I try – clearing cookies, using the website, using the app – it fails in some way. When I link the second account, it merges all of them into the first and disconnects the first.

As of now, there appears to be now way to get a full picture of our retirement accounts in Simplifi because of this regression, and it is a regression. We had two Vanguard accounts in Simplifi for a very long time without any problems.

Thanks for the update to your post, @t975! I used to actually have a Vanguard Small Business account, so I had presumed it was as separate in Simplifi as it was with Vanguard back when I had it. I do not currently have a Vanguard Small Business account, but I was able to sign in to one of my Vanguard accounts using that institution and the other using the standard Vanguard option. In case a visual helps anyone else, this is what is working as of this precise moment. Who knows when it might break? LOL

If Simplifi was designed for a single person (not household finances) and had intentionally limited people to a single account per institution, that would be one thing. As it stands, it doesn’t work like that, isn’t marketed like that, and they would lose a lot of paying customers (and prevent a lot of new customers from signing up) if they choose to go that route.

I had two Vanguard accounts in Simplifi for years. This bug is a regression.

Why they haven’t fixed it is anyone’s guess, but I am still signed in to multiple accounts at American Express, Chase, and more. It is not a limitation of the platform or (thus far) a strategic decision to juice their subscription revenue. If and when that changes, people will vote with their dollars. In the meantime, they ought to fix the bug. People shouldn’t be considering paying them more money to work around a bug they have let languish for this long. If anything, people should be considering switching to a competitor that doesn’t have this bug and is perhaps more responsive when bug like this arise. I’ll leave the investigation of that as an exercise for the reader.

Personally, I tried a lot of alternatives when Mint was shutting down. I hope I don’t have to switch. I don’t want to. But it would make a lot more sense to switch personal finance software than move all my funds from one financial institution to another or pay more for personal finance software that has been frustrating me.

Agreed with Jeff C. This issue has gone on for months with no updates or resolution.

I may put up with this on a free service but as a paying subscriber the radio silence is concerning and will go into my decision to renew in December.

Welp, as I promised earlier, I just spent this evening switching over to one of Simplifi's competitors. I want reiterate what I said pages ago in this thread:

I am a software engineer who's worked extensively in building third-party data feed connections. The symptom of "one user's Vanguard creds overwriting another's" is a very clear sign that there are fundamental problems with Simplifi's credentials-handling architecture. I have lost all confidence in Simplifi's ability to properly handle and secure my data.

I did not try to do that. I only connected all my accounts anew with the other provider (which was already enough of a pain).

For my particular use case, I'm mostly concerned with tracking future spending and being able to keep an eye on all my accounts for fraudulent activity. I went back and corrected the categories for about a month's worth of transactions in the new provider, but I won't bother going back further. I'll just recategorize transactions and establish a new spending baseline going forward.