'Active' pot for card payments

I absolutely love pots and separate my money into distinct budgets i.e. groceries, entertainment, clothes etc. However, to spend from a budget I have to transfer the allocated money from the pot to the ‘available balance’, use the card and then put the remaining back into the pot. This process is not ideal!

Please can we have the option to select a pot as ‘Active’ and for any card payments to then come out of the ‘Active’ pot.

If I go to the supermarket I select groceries as the active pot. If I go to the pub I select entertainment.

This would greatly enhance the functionality and ease of use of pots.

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I believe POTS is in its infancy and there are good things coming in the future. Things like having DDs and SOs for pots and sharing pots so that others can use it and put money into it.

If and when they get this sorted, I think this would enhance and facilitate almost everyones banking needs. (i.e. no need for joint accounts, separate current accounts etc.)

Yes I think this idea deserves more attention :sunglasses: I was thinking of a ‘date night’ pot, allowing you to go out but still be watching what you spend. A night budget almost :monzo:

It would be a great feature to be able to switch your card spending to a different pot. For example youve saved for a holiday. Whilst youre on holiday you say all my day to day card spending comes out of this ‘holiday’ pot. Or perhaps you have a budget each week of £100. You could automatically put £100 a week into that pot and have all of your card transactions come out of that pot (but not direct debits and standing orders etc).

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That’s an interesting idea, @Jpjapers! For now, as you know, Pots exists principally to set money aside – the closest you could get to something like this for your day-to-day spending example is to create Pots for your weekly budget and for direct debits/standing orders, and automate them to transfer just enough for both on the required basis. This isn’t exactly the solution you describe, but we’re always working on improving our features, so thanks for sharing what you would find useful – it really helps.

For more information about scheduling automated withdrawals from Pots, check out this blog post by @Jami :slightly_smiling_face:

Or you could use IFTTT - If card transaction - withdraw from pot.

Downside: You would always need funds in your main account or an overdraft available enough to cover each purchase amount.

This is more or less what bunq offers, except it just has 25 full accounts instead of reinventing the wheel with pots…

Not sure how this helps?

“Here’s a cool idea you should look at implementing”

“Change banks and move to bunq”

Don’t move to bunq!

Please end the pots madness, then these cool features, as you put it, will be much easier to implement.

I put money in pots for holidays / weekends away etc as my spending money

It would be great if i could turn on which pot i want the money to come out of when spending on my card, for example, at the moment I have to transfer money back to the card in order to spend it which then gets confused with my “normal spending” money

Welcome to the forums! :smile:

How would you envision this could happen?

I only ask because I’d assume some sort of interaction with the app which would then lead to the question: why not just transfer it?

Plus if you had other committed spending due to come out (bills, subs etc) it’ll come out of the pot instead of your card…

A Committed Spend Pot has already been suggested and debated on a lot - unfortunately it is being held back a bit :frowning_face:

Although what you’re suggesting here is something akin to Curve (that’s for multiple bank accounts). But I think the main problem is that Pots aren’t actually separate accounts with their own details, so it would, I imagine be fairly difficult to get it to work correctly.

It is a great idea though!

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Like you say, something similar to Curve but, as I understand it, Curve allows you to ‘time travel’ and change which card/bank the payment is to be attributed to.

With all this ‘hands-on’ interaction needed, I’m wondering what the benefit of it is over just transferring it from pot to account?

I, too, like the idea. If you set up the pot to save for something to pay off at a later date then it makes the ‘flow’ much more seamless but I can’t see how it would work that required less interaction than it currently does to move funds.

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I’ve never really been interested by Curve, if I want to spend on a different card, i’ll bring that card out with me.

The thing with pots is it segregates your money and so adds a little bit of friction. Surely the time taken to select the pot you want to pay out of, you could have just moved the money into your main account balance and made the purchase.

Yep - my point exactly. Friction is the word!

How about this?

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Yes, that should be merged in here too.

Only if that’s not a default setting.

For me I treat the ‘available balance’ as a pot… and the categories let me see where I’m spending. I don’t split my pots into ‘Entertainment’ and ‘Groceries’ as they aren’t things I save for… just me thoug!

Yeah I agree you would still need interaction with the app but in my view, would make it a little less clunky when you’ve put money aside for something specific…

I’m thinking along the lines of:
I have £325.59 in my account as my monthly money to spend and i’m going on holiday for a week - I have £400 in my “holiday” pot
If I transfer the £400 to the account, I have £725.59 to spend (which isn’t actually true because half of that is monthly money for when I come back from holiday).
I could transfer £74.41 from the holiday pot to the normal pot to make up the £400 available to spend on the card, but then I have to work that out :wink:
I would then need to transfer money back from the pot in to the normal account when I come back from holiday.

If committed spending still came out of the account (because it is a bill or a recurring payment etc), it would come out of the normal money, and the holiday money would still be separate. Whatever is left over can be transferred back, left in the pot, put in savings etc, whilst my normal account balance is left untouched when I come back from holiday.

But then how would Monzo know which bit of your account to debit money from if you’ve got your main balance and your holiday pot?

Just sounds like it’d be a real headache to manage!