Does Monzo have any guides or anything about money management and budgeting specially with Monzo and it’s features in mind? Would be interested to read it.
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you can set the IFTT to trigger to a certain category - “groceries” - so when your spend is categorised in that category it will move money back into your main account to cover the amount you have spent from the pot that you chose- always assuming the pot has enough in to cover the amount
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It’s not just you. I didn’t like summary from day 1 because it never overrode the balance on the main screen and I store money for bills in a pot like you, so it was always convinced I would run out of money.
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I would say having to move money to cover bills the night before would be stressful for me. 
I have a NatWest Rewards account to deal with salary/bills, Starling has short term savings in Goals like Car/House Insurance, and I know that anything in Monzo is monthly spend from transferring fixed money after payday.
I’ve only got a Groceries and Fuel budget in Monzo, and just try and keep it roughly on the line. Everything else I look at the overall budget and make sure its roughly near the line.
If I end up with anything left at the end of the month that gets cleared into Coin Jar or savings to keep a consistent monthly budget for the following month.
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I have the Natwest Rewards account. It’s brilliant.
Basically for me and my wife, all our bills come out of there so I created a SQL database (teaching myself) to calculate all the bills, who pays for what and then we both put in that amount plus a bit extra each month. All the bills are done then.
Everything else is Monzo. But I like to manually move money around because then it is forcing me to be constantly aware of how much I have. I tend to have a bury head in the sand attitude to money sometimes and it gets me in trouble…
Summary single handedly convinced me to move from Starling.
Previously I was with Starling and wrote my own web app to monitor outstanding DDs and SOs and let me know how much I had to spend until next payday. As soon as I saw how effective Summary was I moved over and decommissioned my app.
By chance I showed my wife it and she immediately signed up and moved over to Monzo.
We’ve both retained our legacy accounts for cheque imaging and as a backup for if we have issues with Monzo. We’ve also kept our Starling accounts for free foreign withdrawal as we’re off somewhere in March that’s almost exclusively cash based.
Anyhow, back to Summary. It’s perfect for our (simple) needs - show the balance minus committed spend so that we know how much we can spend until payday. The “days until payday” even saves having to consult a calendar.
Neither of us use the budgeting feature though, which may be why we find Summary so helpful.
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I set up a combination of IFTTT and automated pot withdrawals to do it all for me automatically. Now that the automated pot withdrawals have been fixed to come out before both standing orders and direct debits, you won’t temporarily go overdrawn too! (although I have an overdraft so going overdrawn for an hour and then going back out again wasn’t that much of an issue as I wouldn’t get charged)
Ah, that’s even better (should have sussed that 
). Thanks Ian.
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Switch salary to monzo? / who has?
I have. No issues in doing so either. Nice and simple way to redistribute my money to other accounts and move to pots.
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I do something similar to you…
Each month on payday, I transfer out all my available balance into pots, then each week I give myself spending money for the week.
I really like that the summary takes off committed spending, makes it much easier to manage money for someone who is awful at managing money! 
I might start using the pots but if I setup a petrol pot etc - and I use Tesco it might class it as groceries and not petrol?
Yes. There’s work to identify them differently, but it’s not a reliable system. Plus, people buy groceries at the petrol kiosk and not buy groceries, so it gets even more complicated. However, I think pay at pump is fairly reliably detected as petrol (don’t quote me on that).
Check out the Monzo blog. There are articles going up there daily!
I normally have my main balance quite low (max £100) and put the rest in pots with automatic pot to account transfer for expected payments via IFTTT. If I need to make a larger payment it puts an extra step to make me think “do I really need this?”.
This makes summary somewhat less useful for me but it’s not something I’d use much anyway /shrug
I just starting having a play with the method of leaving balance low and multiple pots combined with IFTTT so will update you how I fou nd it in a week or so
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I leave my balance low in my main account and use a pot called account surplus. I then transfer funds into my main acccount as and when needed. Main reason as I do use my card for online purchases or if I lose my card, their not going to get much. 
80% of my direct debits go out on the day I get paid, and if I ever forgot to put the money in the night before I’d go into my overdraft temporarily which isn’t really a problem.
I also have issues with the summary, and it doesn’t work for me.
I’ve completely switched to Monzo. I move all money into different pots for nursery, savings and a weekly budget pot when I get paid.
I use IFTTT to move money each Sunday so that I don’t overspend. Actually limiting the money in my available account has really helped me control spending too much money on a daily basis. Weekly budgeting reduced the admin of it all. And anything left at the end of a week I put towards something nice, which gives me the motivation to spend less.
I also haven’t quite worked out how to use budgets and categories with this.
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