Daily Budget

[stewartie4]

I used an app called Daily budget up until I began using Monzo.
The idea is you input all your regular spending, tell it what you get paid, and tell it how much you want to save at the end of the month.
It then tells you how much you can spend per day, and any over or under rolls over to the next day.

I think something like this coupled with alerts for exceeding the budget would be great

[hailstorm (Simon Porter)]

I’ve just started using Squirrel. Similar idea. It takes off bills, then savings and then pays you weekly.

I think being able to budget daily or weekly is a game changer. Gets you out of the mentality of thinking you have loads to spend when your salary comes in.

I’d really like to be able to implement this with Monzo.

[Naji (Naji Esiri)]

I’d be really interested to hear of other apps people use to help them calculate a budgets on a day to day basis and if/how they use them alongside Monzo

[alexs (Alex Sherwood)]

The Monzo app’s targets functionality works differently to what you’ve described but I thought I’d mention it, in case you’re an Android user. Here’s how it works on iOS -

Launching Targets: Our New Budgeting Feature

& it’s on the way for Android users, they’re on the roadmap here

Perhaps some of those features could be included when the targets are reworked, after the current accounts launch.

I’d like to be able to factor in how much I want to save each month (virtual pots will also help with this) & see how much I can spend per day, in order to meet my budget

[cazzzac (Zac)]

I used YNAB until I got out of debt (then I moved to the UK from Australia and the travel blew it out of the water). Their approach of assigning dollars to your various life categories at the start of your pay period works really well. ‘give every dollar a job’ as soon as you receive them.
the difficulty with YNAB is it only works on a month-to-month interval. Monzo could jump in by offering a service based on users’ pay-to-pay interval. If we could assign all our money to our budget categories up front (bills, rent, etc) then monzo could calculate what we could spend daily with what we have left.

[hailstorm (Simon Porter)]

I used to use YNAB too. I eventually got put off by having to do lots of manual entries for all my transactions.

I think those kind of budgeting programs are great if you can set aside some time each week. I’m more excited with Monzo as I’m hoping it’ll be like an automated version of YNAB.

[anon44204028]

YNAB means “You Need A Budget”.

YNAB is a multi-platform personal budgeting program based on the envelope method. It was noted by Lifehacker in 2013 as the most popular personal finance software amongst its readers.

You Need a Budget

[Enzyme17 (Emily)]

I use “Pariti” to see when my bills are coming out… to be honest I still use it alongside monzo, just to keep on top of what will be coming out of my account! I find both really useful!

[cazzzac (Zac)]

Yeah there’s definitely a lot of work involved with YNAB. You have to be motivated to get out of debt of save for something specific - it’s very much about being intentional with how you set aside your money. If Monzo could automate most of the easy bits (for example - pre-filling regular expenses), but still keep some kind of intentional ‘setting aside’ mechanism every pay it’d be the perfect product. Or if YNAB could develop a plug-in for Monzo that’d be perfect.

[hailstorm (Simon Porter)]

Yeah I think bank integration goes a long way to making YNAB less work intensive. I’m kind of hoping that monzo and other such banks will make the need for YNAB irrelevant.

[brendanlawton]

I use two apps in conjunction with my highstreet bank - one called ‘Pennies’ (for the pro-active budgeting aspect) and one called ‘Spending’ (for the retrospective tracking & reports). The pennies app lets you switch between a ‘daily’ view and whatever term defines your budget i.e. a ‘Fun’ budget, set to expire/renew after a month shows you e.g. £540 left for the month and £19 left for today. Or a weekly food budget shows you e.g. £80 left for the week and £11 left for today.

I see that the ‘targets’ feature of Monzo keeps you updated month to month but it would be great to set weekly/custom/one-off budgets as well because you might want to be a bit more eagle-eyed with tracking expenses.

[alexs (Alex Sherwood)]

@brendanlawton

I see that the ‘targets’ feature of Monzo keeps you updated month to month but it would be great to set weekly/custom/one-off budgets as well because you might want to be a bit more eagle-eyed with tracking expenses.

That feature’s on it’s way -

Targets - Custom Timeframes 1

Hey Mathew, welcome to the community! That feature is being worked on [image] Screenshot from this post. Since it wasn’t included in the launch release, it’s a fairly safe bet that this is one of the extra features from this card on the :mondo: roadmap.

possibly soon

Spending Periods

Fully customisable spending periods are definitely in our sight, and hopefully in the short term Having multiple thresholds for a target you set is definitely interesting, one of our earliest ideas for budgeting worked in this direction but we feared over-complication—but maybe it could make more sense now.

[acp (Alex)]

Hi Naji,
I’ve developed a spreadsheet that I use in the iOS Numbers app that I think could be used as a model for an in app feature similar to all these apps. I can email it to you if you like?
Cheers,
Alex

[Bank]

I joined the forum to post about a daily budget feature and see its being discussed already If it could be possible to introduce a daily spend target that would be ace. Due to the nature of my work, I have a day to day budget… provided I stick to it, I’m in financial nirvana

[leonardh (Leonard)]

fancy sharing it on here?

[alexhansford]

One of the things I miss from the prepaid card is the reminder notification of how much you spent today.

It’s a pity it’s not on the Current account right now. ️

[Naji (Naji Esiri)]

@acp Sounds great! Feel free to share on here!

@alexhansford

One of the things I miss from the prepaid card is the reminder notification of how much you spent today.

Notifications should be fixed today and as a result, these summary notifications will return

Correction - general notifications will be back today but unfortunately spending reminders like this are something separate so we will have to wait a little longer for them to arrive on the CA.

[acp (Alex)]

@Naji @leonardh I can’t as it’s an Apple .numbers file. But here are the screenshots with notes.
It’s fairly simple but it works so well and I’ve been using this ‘manual’ system for 7 years and made
many tweaks and changes. (Obviously I’ve used example figures for this demo).

This is the main budgeting section. The outgoings in this section are mandatory/recurring monthly costs.

This is the day to day management section, the bit I use most. At the moment I manually type in every spend as I spend it. Doing this means delayed charges (TFL, Online, etc) are accounted for immediately to avoid nasty “oh yeh I forgot I spent that” moments.

I would be interested to hear what you all think.

Obviously, if Monzo integrated this model into the app it would save me having to do it manually. But I’d still want to have a ‘daily notes’ or ‘upcoming charge alert’ for those delayed spends. I.E. Put a spend into a day manually, as a note…?

[moobot (Marc)]

I use Bluecoins on Android - it’s pretty detailed so there is a bit of a learning curve but well worth it once you’ve got it up and running.

It does require you to manually input all transactions, transfers and income (recurring transactions can be automated) but I actually find this useful. It makes me more aware of what I am spending / have left to spend.

[effsee (Frank)]

@acp that looks very cool (nothing like some good spreadsheet geekery ).

Would be great if you could work out how to export & share as an excel readable file.