I thought it would be fun to have a place where we could set out what our fantasy tabs in Trends would be. From the weird and whacky to the functional and useful.
Right now we have Balance (which tracks your current and predicts your future balance), Spending (barcharts of spend globally and by category), and Targets (monthly budgeting).
Perhaps you might want to track your savings goals? Or want to see your income over years adjusted for inflation? Or the value of your house against the amount you owe on your mortgage? Or a net worth tracker?
Tell us what problem you’re trying to solve and what the solution might be!
This single feature would be able to add whatever financials you have into Monzo (where they don’t already exist) and build a complete picture of your worth. I’m excluding crypto from this, as coins change value rapidly and constantly - keeping up with this using a manual account would be painful, so unless Monzo integrates real-time crypto I’d exclude crypto totally.
Then a lovely graph to show what the net of your assets and debts are, which is hopefully going up, with alarms/notifications if it is flat-lining or even worse, going down.
I’ve had this exact scenario using YNAB for the last 8 years (several other platforms too since 1995, including cough, spreadhseets) but decided this time not to renew the YNAB (extortionately-increased) sub and take a leap of faith into Monzo-status-only because of how Trends was developing. Plus manually reconciling all your accounts/assets/etc. is very time-consuming.
Principally I want Monzo to decide what it is, is it a bank or an aggregator. If it’s the former then trends to me should focus on financial insights across accounts first and foremost.
Things such as more detailed insights per category “if you spent xx less on shopping you could save yy per month” and “your spending on onlyfans has increased this month”
If the latter then trends could be ever more powerful, offering saving rates, tips on bills etc much like Emma, snoop, Lumio.
Specifically:
A dashboard which had the three graphs in a row, these are the most useful bits of trends and would allow clicking into the detail if I wished.
And the ability to set additional expenditure into an “over” category. For example if you’re getting a wood stove and you know that this means your spending will be £4500 up you can reflect this.
I’ve explained previously how I tend use my monzo account, and I’m mostly interested in things that tell me whether I’m spending more or less than “normal.”
A rolling 30 day spending analysis might be nice, particularly if it broke down by merchants, compared with the previous 30 days, but would need some thought to make sure that it didn’t double count some bills in the short months.
Something automagical with the Target that monitors all accounts including connected accounts and on a daily/weekly period, hoovers up your under target amount from where you should be and pops that into a interest savings pot, or the new Monzo stocks and shares ISA account. You’re then back on target. If you go over target, then no savings transfer occurs.
If we’re talking fantasy tabs, then how about one called… Insights?
Think Monzo social media graphics kind of insights. “You typically spend £5 at the kebab van for every £10 you spend in the local pub” kind of thing.
I bet people have so many habits regarding spending, that they don’t even realise they’re doing it.
“You spend X on takeaway every Friday. You could save Y each year by only ordering in every fortnight”
Some might see this as getting too personal, but I think it would be fascinating to be able to opt in to those kind of stats.
I actually think that’s what trends “could’ve been”. A level of personalised insights “you’re spending more on takeaways this month” vs the same categories and amounts with three different graphs.
Right now it seems like there’s a lot of duplication, and hopefully overtime this changes.
I’m so down with my forum compadre, @davidwalton (obvs):
I really want to do this too. My pain point is a) having all my various assets and liabilities all in one place, updated is as real time as they can be, and b) doing something useful with that.
I’d love a tab called Wealth that showed a line graph of my assets and debts over an extended period (so years), with the gap between them either coloured red if I’m in negative equity or green if I’m gaining. And I’d like to see a breakdown in the bottom half of how my gains are increasing year on year (and, if possible, what’s driving that). God tier would be to be able to see how my personal wealth is performing against a) an average stock market performance (e.g. World ETF); b) inflation; c) the Bank of England base-rate / average savings rate in the UK.
To do that I’d like to be able to plug in my property details and have the Zoopla (or similar) API return the value of my property, my mortgage picked up (), all my savings (need manual accounts for this), and investments in Monzo (competitive rate please) and/or the ability to enter your holdings and have Monzo track its worth.
2. Goals:
I’m not talking about the goals against pots or Starling / Simple Goals. I’m talking about something a bit more fundamental.
I want somewhere where I can list the things I’m working to. That might be fundamental financial plans (like an emergency fund if I’m out of work), or debts that I’m trying to manage (pay off loans or pay off the mortgage early), or nice stuff (deposit for a house, a new kitchen or a new phone, university funds for each of the kids).
The problem with things like goals in Pots is that they assume that there’s one account per goal. I don’t work that way. Instead, I want to be able to prioritise my goals and then assign my savings / investments to all, some or none of them. And then I want Monzo to create some funding schedules for me to be able to fulfil the ones that aren’t already funded.
For example, I want to give each of the kids £10k for university. What’s the due date for these goals? What would the weekly/monthly/yearly funding needed to achieve that? Then I want Monzo to (if I choose) set up standing orders to make that happen. Or alternatively just track progress.
Then, for short term goals (like buying a new phone or saving for a holiday next year) I’d like to be able to have Monzo manage the transfer of money between accounts and then payment without it upsetting the monthly budget in Targets Budgets.
3. Spending Over Years:
I want to see insights as to how my spending has changed over years!
Give me graphs that show total expenditure by year, or averages across years.
Actually, I think all I’m asking for is a Years view in Spending - so we’ve got months (month view, broken down into weeks) and years (year view, broken down into months), but I think I want to see more. We’ve not got the data for decades yet, but certainly I want to see trends across years…
This one would be the inverse of Goals (see up there ).
I have some debt that I try and manage sensibly. For me that includes my mortgage, some 0% balance transfer cards and some BNPL things. I’m lucky that (mortgage aside) these are all 0%, but for some folk they’ll be struggling with repayment.
So what is the problem?
I want somewhere where I visualise all my debt individually or collectively so I make decisions on how best to manage it.
I want to know how long it’ll take to pay it all off, the interest rate(s) and monthly expenditure on debt servicing.
I want to know when my loan terms are ending and if they’ll be any outstanding capital to be paid off.
I want to be alerted in good time before, for example, my 0% credit card expires (revenue opportunity: offer me alternatives I can switch to in the app)
I want to be able to allocate the money that I would have spent on debt repayment to either savings or on living a bit better in my subsequent monthly budgets.
I want to automatically set Goals (see above) to cover debt repayments.
I know I’m lucky financially, so this is very much icing on the cake for me. But for those struggling with debt, done right this could be a lifeline.
To next level it one graph that shows, over time, expenditure and income, so you can see “at a glance” if you are consistently spending more than you earn month to month
To add, some sort of further intelligence within Monzo. I have to Say Natwest (and, I presume, RBS) have really nailed it here. You can set budgets, see spending by category and also the dashboard provides some really useful insights.
I’d love to see similar in Monzo in the near future
I’m imagining a stacked bar chart that plots a) expenditure and b) money into savings and investments. Then a line graph over that that shows income so you can see the delta.
You’d need to be able to select what goes into the barchart of course, as some folk would just want expenditure, some savings and some investments as well. And on the income side I have different categories for salary and other income (interest etc).
This might be a subset of the debt tracker above, but I’m keen for graphs to complement @HB’s amazing mortgage connection.
Basically, I want to see a nice visualisation of mortgage payments over time so far (breaking down capital and interest) and being able to project it into the future.
(And a feed for the mortgage please, with past payments shown!)
6. Gross salary and deductions tracker
This is might be a bit niche (and might be more applicable to the US where I think payroll processors have APIs for this type of data), but I’d like to track my salary before tax.
This means telling Monzo my gross salary, pension contributions and any deductions then being able to see stuff in Trends like:
Changes in gross salary over time
Effective tax rate
The value of any salary sacrifices / things I’ve paid for before tax.
Like I say, might not be for everyone, but I’d love to see this info in Monzo!
I’ve had this exact scenario using YNAB for the last 8 years (several other platforms too since 1995, including cough, spreadhseets) but decided this time not to renew the YNAB (extortionately-increased) sub and take a leap of faith into Monzo-status-only because of how Trends was developing. Plus manually reconciling all your accounts/assets/etc. is very time-consuming.
), all my savings (need manual accounts for this), and investments in Monzo (competitive rate please) and/or the ability to enter your holdings and have Monzo track its worth.
