Problem: My budget for the rest of the month never works for me, so I don’t ever really know how well I’m doing.
Context: As soon as I get paid, I throw money into some pots, and also into another account. I am typically then left with an amount that I would consider my ‘monthly spend’. I will often pull money out of one of my pots in order to pay for those ‘out of the ordinary’ purchases, maybe it was a holiday, maybe it was a gift and I consider them to not necessarily be part of my budget for the month.
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I have tried using the budget tool to reflect this but unless I’m missing something, I am unable to replicate the behaviour, maybe I’m on the end of the curve when I thought I was in the middle! I appreciate that not everyones case could be solved, I’m sure we all do odd things, but if nothing else if I have budgets disabled then I’d really like Monzo not to keep telling me on my home screen that ‘it looks like you will go over this month!’ If it doesn’t work for me, at least let me turn it off?
If you set the amount of money you keep in your main account as your budget, and then exclude from summary anything extra that you transfer in from pots or another account, would that work for you?
Or if you go to labs you can turn off left to spend
I set a £600 monthly budget but have pots for sporadic spends (e.g. birthdays).
I let my budget run and categorise spending as it happens. But if there’s a birthday present bought I toggle “exclude from summary” within the transaction and withdraw that amount from the birthday pot.
When I’m paid I seed pots like birthday and Christmas with a set amount each month so they’ve money in them.
Thanks everyone for the helpful tips! Will try some of these out.
And thanks for the reminder that I can already turn it off, I often forget how to get back to that menu where it exists. Cheers!