On my current account home screen I want to see my balance but also what will be left after my committed spends leave. Is this possible?
Or, are we pushed more towards working this out and setting what will be left as a Budget?
I don’t need to specifically budget and set myself individual max spends for everything. I just want to see what’s left (or will be left) until payday directly under my balance.
Putting all my bills into another bills Pot also seems counter intuative to me.
It might not make sense to you but doing this would solve your issue.
All your bills money would be separated and ring fenced, safe that it won’t get accidentally spent and then your balance will display what’s left to spend.
You then said that you “don’t need to budget”, but this is exactly what you’re wanting to do - which is fine. Plenty of people do this and some even have their bills come out of a separate bank account for even greater segregation.
Bills pots is 95% of the answer. Once you’ve set-up all of your committed spending (Scheduled payments, Standing orders & Direct Debits) to be from the dedicated Bills pot(s), what you see on the Home display is your account current balance (excluding pots) and, if enabled in Labs, the Summary ‘bar’ of what is left to spend.
Note that Subscriptions can’t be paid-from-a-pot, but as they are known to Monzo as repeating transactions, they are automatically removed from the left-to-spend figure displayed, so that what is shown as ‘Left to spend’ really is what you have left to spend.
Also, you can set transactions to be excluded from the Summary report, but I don’t ever do this as it (obviously) seems to skew the numbers.
Simple do exactly this in the US. And it’s what I’ve been wanting from a U.K. bank for almost a decade now. I was excited when startups like Atom, Mondo, and Starling were announced. They all made the same promise of what Simple offered, but none of them delivered. So I’m still waiting. Atom still could as they haven’t got into current accounts yet, and their largest investor owns Simple, but I’m not hopeful.
This would do the job, but it’s a lot of friction, and the pots UI just isn’t intuitive enough for this to work well.
This works to an extent, but it’s limited. The algorithm doesn’t do any intelligent predicting, so if things don’t happen exactly as the app thinks it will, it just doesn’t work at all. All it takes is my iTunes subscriptions to be taken a day earlier or later, and the app won’t consider them part of my designated committed spend. If a direct debit is a few days early or late, it’ll be classified in the wrong budget period and so left to spend won’t take into account the next payment. The period options are too limited as we move into a world where more and more household products become available via subscription and are delivered as and when you’ll run out, which can often be more obscure periods than a simple monthly payment. They either need to take a much simpler approach to this, or a more complicated with one with more tools and options for the user to use. I’m hoping the Monzo Plus plan for budgeters will make progress with that, if/when they eventually launch it.
Clearly there are people that would like it the other way as this thread demonstrates but knowing my pot has enough to cover my bills and what is in my main account is to spend, is soooo much easier for me.
Agreed, I absolutely adore Bills Pots, I mean I only have one Bills Pot and it all comes out of there, but in my opinion, when I really think about it, it’s probably the best thing about Monzo. I LOVE IT, I’m not sure how you could make it any easier to use or more intuitive use either?
This is what made me switch over to Monzo as my main bank. Previously I had DD come from Natwest and ‘spends’ with Monzo. I’m much happier with it all together.
Each to their own on how many bills pots to use I could see why having multiple could be useful
As a developer I love automation, but I quite like manually sending it to the bills pot when i get paid, don’t know why, weird i know, but results are still the same. But yes, after I’ve done that, whatever is left is left
Completely agree, I don’t even think about it anymore, it’s easy to forget it exists, but I could never move to another bank that doesn’t have this feature.
The only way it can get better is if subscriptions can be linked to it too but that would be a nice to have and i can wait
Ah, that’s my bad, I misread their comment. I thought they meant moving their money to pots manually, and then moving it back for a bill or subscription, rather than using the actual bills pots feature.
Bills pots are great, but I don’t think they completely solve the issue yet, because they only work with direct debits. I would still have to move money manually for my bills that aren’t paid by direct debit.
If they expand the feature to include more than just direct debits, day, pots for specific merchants or categories, or subscriptions (if they add more control for frequency), I would make Monzo my main account again in a heartbeat.
Don’t set a Budget and simply use the Left to Spend figure displayed at the top of the screen next to the balance. It’s the way I’ve always run my finances and it works a treat.
Ignore Bill pots too, they also work but they’re over and above the basic functionality you seem to be after.
I could see why having multiple could be useful