I’ve seen a few post regarding a Low Balance notification and I think its a great idea! I have a couple of other ideas that would help avoid Declined transaction due to low balance:
Morning report / alert:
It would be awesome if we could have a warning in the morning that let us know we are not going to have enough money for the rest of the day. It could use our activity to extrapolate the average spending per day of the week and let us know we’re gonna be short. For exemple lets say every Monday you spend 7.5 in coffee, transport and lunch, if in the AM your balance is lower then that, a nice message would pop up:
“Oops it looks like you’re gonna be short today, do you want to top up?”
An option to add a red dot notification to the Monzo icon (on iOS) if the balance gets under a certain amount would be amazing. Maybe even show the amount left?
Auto transfer from a pot to another. It would be amazing to have the ability to automatically transfer money from a pop to the main account when we try to pay something and it gets declined. (With bespoke configuration) Once we top up, the app could ask if we want to put back the money in the pot we borrowed from. Basically borrowing from ourselves. Maybe a similar setup as the Coin Jar, have this option turned on for pots called “Buffer”
Notification when balance gets below a threshold. I put this one again cause I think it would be very useful, although Im not sure its in the spirit of the app when we use Monzo as a main banking solution.
Since one of the selling points for pots is to be able to ring-fence money away from accidental spending, transferring automatically from pots doesn’t really make sense.
Maybe if you are often short on cash try an overdraft? This will let transactions through, send you a notification that you’re overdrawn, and if you move money from pots and/or top-up within the same day you won’t be charged any overdraft fees.
I think this would have been a great idea during the prepaid beta. Although now Monzo is my main and only account, I feel the top up notifications would be redundant, due to physically not having any money elsewhere to ‘top up’ with.
Now if it could be intelligent and say, “looks like you’re going to be short today, you have insert amount available to move from your pots”? I guess we could even go further and mark a pot as ‘saving’ or ‘money to use’ so that my house savings aren’t taking into account in the notification, but my ‘bills’ pot would be and I get prompted to move from that?
I’m not sure I can get my head around the idea of a pot that’s ring-fenced until it’s not. If I want to have money available to spend ‘just in case’ then I won’t put it into a pot in the first place. Moving it out and back again, particularly when there’s no prospect of an interest payment, just seems to over-complicate matters to me. Of course, once a pot translates into an interest bearing account elsewhere then I’ll need to revisit my opinion.
I was being drawn to the “bills pot” idea for a while but if they get the DD aspect of ‘Committed Spend’ on the Summary screen correct then I won’t even need that any more.
Clearly this is just me and I can’t speak for anyone else of course.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t ‘ring-fence’ any of my daily funds either. I use pots for holidays and house savings (those that are separate to my LISA). I do think the new summary does take away the need for a dedicated bills pot too, but I guess a lot of other people like to micromanage their money by having it separated into smaller accounts (pots).
A ‘Buffer’ pot would be nice. Also, maybe the option of having your overdraft in a separate ‘overdraft’ pot where you could withdraw your overdraft from.
