I signed up for Perks to see if the joint instant savings pot does now get the higher interest, but it does not, so have cancelled this again.
If you dig into the sign up screens though they still only mention personal savings accounts.
The reason I was hopeful was due to a recent terms update for my instant access savings pots that seemed to say otherwise when I read them. See excerptās below.
Hey ho but, hopefully, we will still see this in the future.
ā## Eligibility
You can open a personal Instant Access Savings Pot if you have a Monzo current account. You can open a joint Instant Access Savings Pot if you have a Monzo joint account. In these terms, the words āInstant Access Savings Potā are used to refer to both personal and joint Instant Access Savings Pots.
Upgrading to or Cancelling a plan which offers a higher interest rate
If you take out Monzo Plus or Monzo Premium or a plan that offers a higher interest rate, youāll get the higher interest rate on your Instant Access Savings Pot from the day you upgrade.ā
My wife and I have been using a traditional bank for decades, but we are both very busy with full-time jobs so budgeting has always been difficult to manage properly. Hence we are looking to open personal accounts & a joint account with Monzo (or Starling), purely for the much better budgeting features offered. The pots/spaces feature and being able to pay bills from there, and have virtual cards that pay directly from there, will make a massive difference.
The idea is that both our salaries will be paid into our Joint account, from which all our joint bills and joint expenses will be paid - including Groceries. We will have a proportion also being transferred from our Joint Account into our personal current accounts for our own personal expenses.
As far as I can tell so far, both Monzo and Starling have very similar features. I would consider paying the Ā£36 per year Monzo Extra if it offered anything - in the way of budgeting features - that Starling doesnāt. Examples where Monzo Extra may have the edge over Starling is ācustom categoriesā and āautomatic salary sortingā into the different pots. I need to check on this and whether there are other budgeting pros/cons.
However, one thing that will really help us is both being able to use a Virtual Card connected with our Joint Account (not Personal) for groceries spending, so that when each of us goes supermarket shopping and pay with this card the money will come straight out of our dedicated āGroceriesā pot/space on our Joint Account. As I read the above restrictions, it seems we will not be able to do this unless we both have Extra. Only the person with Extra can use Virtual Cards. There is no way that I am forking out Ā£72 just for this! Please clarify this. Is there some workaround?
Furthermore, it looks like Starling does offer this for free with their Joint Account!
This is a deal-breaker for me. I was definitely veering to Monzo and as mentioned would probably pay the Ā£36 for the extra features of ācustom categoriesā and āautomatic salary sortingā. However, frankly, even if these other features were offered for free by Monzo, the lack of this JA mutual virtual card functionality outweighs those other potential benefits which we will have to sacrifice. Itās disappointing as I was hoping to find it all in one place, but at present it seems Starling will be the best option for us.
You are right, that only the person who pays for one of Monzoās paid accounts can see and manage virtual cards, however you could try manually adding the virtual card to your wifeās Apple Pay/Google Wallet.
Only you will be able to manage the card (freeze, archieve, etc.) but she should still be able to spend on it. This is not an ideal solution as the card will be associated with you and not your wife, and you may enounter the occasional glitch, but itās an option to consider none-the-less.
Monzoās Salary sorter is not fully automatic in the UK. You need to manually select the amounts to send to which accounts/pots but it will remember this for next time - but youāll still need to manually confirm it before sorting.
The Salary Sorter feature is free - you donāt need a paid plan to use it (the income just has to be greater than Ā£100.00 to sort)
Are you sure that salary sorter will work as expected here? Last time I tried I couldnāt sort into Joint account pots from a payment made to my personal account. If you are paid into the joint account you may be able to sort into Joint pots but not Personal pots?
ā¦ which is exactly what we do - salaries are paid into Joint account and sorted into the JA Bills pot along with other accounts, which works. Never tried the other way around (Sorting from Personal account to JA pots) so can neither confirm or deny thatāll work!
Thanks for this workaround. Didnāt realise a card associated with me could be added to my wifeās Apple Pay. This could swing us to Monzo though Iād probably be concerned about āglitchesā as you say.
Thatās correct.
That is a plus for Monzo as I donāt think Starlingās feature āremembersā how the salary was sorted for next time, although weāll have to do this twice in the Joint account ie. for both our salaries. OTOH Starling does allow sorting income into spaces/accounts by percentage (as well as Ā£ amounts) which could be useful to some.
I can see how remembering would be useful where, like both of us, you are paid approx. the same amount each month and youāve worked out how much you want to budget putting into the different pots each month. However Iām now wondering how is the Salary Sorter much better than simply setting up scheduled payments into the different pots? Most people are paid on approx. the same day so these can be scheduled a couple of days later, and you could always do some adjusting transfers if needs be. In fact it seems easier to do this. I feel I must be missing something as Iāve seen a lot of praise for this feature.
You could always set up a scheduled payment into a pot. But once set up, this is āalmost invisibleā to you and you have to remember to edit it if required, before it next triggers.
The Salary sort is more of a āDo it nowā trigger (especially as you have the new āsub-buttonā on any qualifying income transaction) which forces you to move funds now, in time for when the bills are due.
Iāve always preferred the sorting method. Once done, it is done for the current cycle and you can forget about it, but I see how people may prefer the scheduled payment method too.
Thanks for the explanation. I think in our case auto scheduled payments from our Joint account into pots/personal accounts will be preferable but I appreciate the circumstances vary, plus Iām sure itās one of those things that I need to practice with before fully appreciating.
Watch out for salaries or pensions (like me) being paid into joint accounts - they are ignored when applying for personal overdrafts or loans which is frustrating!
Something funky is happening with subscriptions again on the latest TestFlight version (5.90.0) for my joint account. It looks like Direct Debits and Subscriptions have been combined which is great but some of my subscriptions are not showing up in the new list.
@rossmonzo - Would you be able to check if anything has changed or been reverted please?
BurnyCubbers77
(š„ Watching things burn from the sidelines. Is this the end?)
101
Same for me, but affects both Joint and Personal accounts.
Sure. When I last checked the app, under Payments ā Scheduled, I would see a list of Direct Debits followed by a list of Subscriptions. At some point recently, that has changed to a list of consolidated Subscriptions and Direct Debits.
The problem for me in my joint account (and probably in my personal account too but Iāve moved most of the subscriptions) is that Iām missing some subscriptions from the new list. Itās possible Iām missing all of them but Iāve cancelled a few recently so itās difficult to tell exactly whatās missing.
Does that help? I can provide screenshots but itās hard to show whatās missing!
BurnyCubbers77
(š„ Watching things burn from the sidelines. Is this the end?)
105
As @twigusa mentions:
Direct Debits and Subscriptions used to be 2 different lists. These are now appear to be combined into a single list, however all of my āsubscriptionsā (aka, repeating payments that are not Direct Debits) do not populate into the list at all.
This is on both my personal and joint accounts.
I have done some testing this morning and it seems to only impact subscriptions that are paid directly from a virtual card attached to a pot. Any subscriptions paid using from the main account are showing. Iāve already tried unmarking as a subscription, and then remarking as a subscription, and it still them same.
(As a side note, it does appear that you canāt mark payments on Flex as a repeating subscription, but I donāt think this is new).
I am having an issue with this as well. I had two direct debits with the same merchant, each with a different amount showing separately. Now only one shows, and no matter how I try to get both back it doesnāt work. Itās now messing up Trends.
