Hello,
Following on from the ability to reverse impulse spending, this is in relation to online expenditure and while it may be more relevant to those with a bipolar condition, I argue this feature could be enjoyed by all. However needless to say other than getting a refund there’s no way to reverse impulse spending made in store, which is where I have an issue, especially since I work in retail and am frequently surrounded by retail stores and constant in-your-face advertising. Most of my transactions are small sizes (between £1 and £10) but at a higher frequency. Of course this builds up.
I have had a really good conversation with Monzo about tackling impulse spending in stores and here is a summary of the conversation;
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In the thread by @Tjenkinson he discusses renaming your pots ‘Week 1’ through to ‘Week 4’. While this is a very good idea, you need financial discipline to ensure the money stays in those pots until the next week comes. So for people struggling to make their money stretch from payday to payday, the idea of Monzo holding and releasing your salary on an agreed date of frequency (e.g. weekly, bi-weekly) after committed spending expenditures could be the workaround. Let’s say you have £100 left after bills and you get your salary monthly, Monzo will release £25 a week, or something to this effect. Of course there would be allowances for emergencies etc.
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We spoke about blocking gambling transactions and how you can request the block to be removed which takes 48 hours, which gives you time to plan ahead in case you’re going to a day at the races for instance. A similar strategy could be employed here, where spending could be blocked between certain times of the day so that you are discouraged from spending needlessly. For me, the inability to buy that morning coffee on the way to work because my card will not activate until 9am would help me dramatically. I never have any emergency reasons why I need to spend money on my way to work, but if there was then Monzo would be on hand to support.
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We spoke about the Summary Page. Apologies if this has already been mentioned, but I found the Summary Page useful but useless. This is because the majority of places I shop at do multiple categories. For example, if you go to a restaurant, you might buy food AND drink, so arguably for some people this is two categories: Eating Out and Alcohol. Sure you could tag them, but tags are not reflected in the Summary Page. Further, your main supermarket probably does the following categories on one shop: Eating Out, Groceries, Personal Care etc. So the idea is to have the ability to split the transaction up into it’s appropriate categories. This would avoid masking inessential purchases and labelling them as ‘Groceries’ for example, thus deepening and enhancing your spending insights.
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Pots: if you are about to withdraw from a pot, a notification or message could pop up to ask if you really want to withdraw money from the pot. For example, withdrawing £5 from the ‘Eating Out’ pot may prompt the following message based on your spending trends;
Your spending is a little high on this pot for this month, are you sure you want to continue this withdrawal?
Or another example
You haven’t withdrawn from this pot in 16 days now. Are you sure you want to break your streak and withdraw?
These can be a little more targeted and specific rather than just a bland “Are you sure you want to do this?” message. They can also be focused on mindfulness, encouraging you to take a mental break or offering you the option to pause spending for x amount of minutes to give you time to cool down.
I’d love to hear what you guys think. If you’ve made it to the bottom of this, thanks for reading.