There is various information about paying from pots, but it is difficult to work out what is the current situation. It seems that the way to pay from pots is to have a direct debit. However, this is fairly useless for me.
For instance I have a pot for car expenses and if I pay a garage bill I want to pay from the car pot using the debit card. There is something about using virtual cards on monzo premium, but this seems massively convoluted. This is besides having to pay extra for something I use infrequently.
I don’t see why monzo make such a fuss made about pots when they are pretty well useless if you can’t easily pay directly from them. I don’t need pots for direct debit monthly payments, e.g. water, as they are predictable and I don’t need a pot for them. Am I missing something obvious here?
Monzo Plus > Car Pot with virtual card attached and pay with that card Apple/Google pay when the time comes. This pays directly from Pot with virtual card.
Save money in Pot, when made payment with normal debit card > withdraw funds to main account.
Alternatively, Chase allow you to move the card to which account your fund is in to spend directly from it.
Direct debits assigned to Pots move the funds into your main account when the payment is due, this keeps the money aside so people don’t spend it, so it serves a purpose.
Sounds more like you don’t understand the Pot function, vs it being convoluted.
Thanks for the reply, that is helpful. The problems I have with these options are:
Costs £60 pa which I guess is an option, but seems a lot to do something basic. I don’t need other monzo plus functions and most doesn’t work with joint accounts anyway.
This skews the total expenditure per month figures. I want to show a fixed amount per month for, say, car expenses and pay from the pot. Once you transfer money across this goes down as an expense from the pot so defeats the object of the pot.
Starling offer free virtual cards, and from a statement point of view it all comes from the same account, and bills/payments are made directly from Space.
However, on a statement it’s just simplified as if all come from the main balance.
Starling Spending is also fairly decent, but not as good as Monzo trends.
Chase could be good once they implement some form of budgeting analytics.
Your car spend isn’t a regular spend (assumed) so will be difficult to factor to any budgeting system.
If you move to America, pots will work the way you want them to. In the US, Monzo just let you assign merchants to pots, so there’s none of that micro managing withdrawals are trying to get by with the convoluted virtual cards and their limitations.
I think I may have picked up some of the American information which would explain my confusion. Moving to America is a slightly drastic solution, much as I like Sant Barbara!