I currently have £0 in my balance. Monzo thinks I’m going to miss all my bills, get evicted and starve to death.
Ofcourse the money is neatly tucked away in pots, away from the possibility of me spending it before it’s due to be snatched from my cold bitter hands.
Shopping - comes directly from pots when I spend
Petrol - same
Bills - I move the money into my balance the night before
On the event I don’t have something set up and go into my OD, I generally just move it when I get a second
Well, certainly the way you operate your account is in conflict with the way Summary works. Either keep doing things your way, and accept Summary giving you false warnings, or adapt to how Summary works.
I guess.
Summary is designed to let you know how much you can spend after taking into account Committed Spending. Of course it’s going to be out of whack if it thinks you’re committed to spending a certain amount but haven’t got it.
I also use Monzo this way. I have a pot for Food Shopping and Petrol and pop my budget for each month in there.
The problem I found with committed spends that I found was that it expected me to spend the same amount each week. But for me, especially on the food shop that is never the case.
And then when it came to setting budgets, they never disappeared off the Summary screen either. So even though I would say right I’ve got £500 for the food shop this month, I would still be showing £560 or something when truthfully, I only had £60 left to spend because the £500 was already accounted for.
Maybe I have misunderstood some of this as I set this up early in my Monzo life (September) but it does generally work for me to siphon off my money into budgeted pots.
I never really pay attention to the Summary chart. Never worked for me the way that I (and yourself) use it.
I know this was asked more to @thisistomok but for me I personally manually move my money from the pot to cover the shop and then move what’s left of it back in.
This has been covered many time and you are definitely not alone. Summary has never worked for me because of exactly this.
Monzo gave us an incredibly powerful tool with pots… And then summary that doesn’t work with pots!!
I don’t use pots except for savings, so my summary is always low, but that’s fine. If it has a large balance I’ll pull it out and invest it (or transfer to savings pot). Isn’t that how it’s meant to work? It shows you what is left after bills so that you dont need to use pots for budgeting?
I believe if you set an overall target budget (“what’s the most you want to spend”), it overrides the actual amount in your account (£0) for your spending period left to spend.
Easy access ringfenced money, the ability to move it automatically out of sight out of mind.
I’ve always felt uneasy about having a lump sum in my account account.
The safety net of having the money ringfenced is fantastic. Also summary can’t anticipate my spending like I can, so it’s great for putting a little safely away for ‘x’ that is definitely happening but maybe not a commited spend etc.
Well I always look at Summary rather than the homepage when I want my balance, so it’s effectively the same. Or are you saying you want your card to be declined if you overspend? I actually dont use my card for purchases, so as long as there’s enough in there for one trip to the ATM every 4-6 weeks, I’m happy.
Does it though? On the overall budget or the individual budgets?
My scenario for example I have a £500 budget for food shopping and £100 budget for petrol over the course of the month. All my bills are moved to a separate joint account so that doesn’t affect my Monzo really as it goes out as soon as I get paid.
I then have £100 left after all my bills, savings etc have been accounted for. If I left all the money in the main pot it will show in my summary that I have £700 left to spend even though I have allocated £500 and £100 of that to other budgets.
It’s why I use pots to be honest because the visual affect of seeing £700 is not good for me.
