Christmas Savings Pot

Feedback & Ideas
1

I know, I know, it’s the middle of a heatwave :fire: and I’m talking Christmas :snowman: already, but bear with me here!

In the dim and distant past I used to make use of a Christmas savings account provided by a Building Society. The basic idea behind it is that you are permitted to save £x per month, but not permitted to withdraw anything at all (unless you closed the account I guess), and once you reached mid-November (I can’t remember exactly, it might have been the end of November), the account ends, and the money you’d put by was transferred into your current account so you could fritter it away on Scalextric sets and Raleigh Grifters…

Anyway, back to today and I’ve just seen a sneak peek of locking for pots, and I’m wondering if perhaps we could replicate that functionality with a pot and a regular payment, with very little work (probably!) needed for Monzo:

So, create a new pot and somehow mark this as Christmas Savings (with appropriate imagery to select from, should we not have user-selectable pot images by then :man_shrugging:) and a user-selected End Date. The pot is created and immediately becomes barred from having withdrawals, but you are able to set up a regular payment into it as part of the setup, and also add money on an ad-hoc basis. Once we reach the End Date, the regular payment is automatically stopped and the pot becomes a “normal” pot, withdrawals now being possible.

Since moving away from that Building Society I now have a similar process set up with my NatWest account, albeit everything having to be managed by a specific Standing Order and diary entries to remind me when to stop and restart the process, but tbh I’d prefer to have something that “just works” in Monzo instead.

What do you lot think?

2 Likes
2

I like this idea, but I think it would be handy to have some way to unlock the pot to get funds back in an emergency (maybe a 24hour unlock period before you can withdraw funds?)

I’d hate to have my car break down and need to repair it the day after moving a lump some of funds into a locked pot

3

Unlock it in time for Black Friday sales

4

Perhaps the new lock/unlock pot system has this integrated?

5

:crossed_fingers:

6

Would be nice to use a locked interest generating roundup pot for this…

7

I use my One Penny Savings for Christmas :slight_smile:️

Jan-August is around £200 ish I’ll use for September holiday.

Anything after that is Christmas for the few people I bother to buy for :see_no_evil:

2 Likes
8

I like it. I’ve got a Planes, Trains and Automobiles pot that I’ve been putting £20pm into since January to get me home for Christmas. :small_airplane:️:steam_locomotive::oncoming_taxi:

https://uproxx.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/pta-ending2.gif?w=650(image larger than 3072KB)

1 Like
9

Like the idea of locking pots a lot, its quite useful. Just trying to think of striking the balance between locking the pot as a deterrent and not making unlocking too easy which would invalidate the point of locking.

When I lived overseas, I had a 32 day account which was locked and to draw money you would need to give 32 days notice. Maybe something like this could be implemented on pots with a shorter period(or user defined)

1 Like