We’re in the very lucky position that my parents are gifting us the funds to purchase a property. The solicitors are insisting upon the purchase monies coming directly from our bank account and not from my parents (although my parents and funding source have been fully identified etc by the solicitors for ML purposes). It will mean two sets of funds coming into our account on two different days - £16,500 and then a week or so later £148,500 - and the same day/next day being sent onward to our solicitors. I have to admit to being very anxious about this.
My understanding is I phone Monzo the day before the monies arrive, inform them of the funds arriving, and to ask them to raise sending limits to allow us to send onto the solicitors. Or does this have to be requested in-app?
I’ve just read so many scare stories on these forums when looking at house buying and funds being sent, without the added complication of large family gifts being thrown in! Is there anything else I should be doing that would keep things simple and streamlined? Opening another bank account at this point isn’t an option, although with hindsight I’m regretting shutting down my Natwest account now even though they have got rid of local branches!
You don’t phone, you do it all in the app and you have to do it on the day.
You don’t have to do anything about money arriving.
Request it early. Include all the details/selfie at the first step and don’t have any money in pots. They won’t raise the limit until you have the money in the account.
Thank you! We’ll make sure in that case that the funds hit my account a day before each time so I can in-app request the limit increase. The solicitors are happy to accept the funds from us in the week ahead of completion which is helpful in case of any delays on that part as the in-app chat response time worries me.
Chat is patchy for its opening hours. Some people have it 24/7, others it’s shuts at 8pm (I think), so you might be able to request it just after midnight to give yourself longer.
Try not to worry, if you’ve been searching/reading you’ll see that it’s solved that day. I think there was only one that took into the next day as they seemed to be forgotten.
@AlanDoe is there a template that you could help with for these sorts of topics?
Name
DOB
Reason
Limit
Selfie
Etc etc
Just to help the persons chances of covering all bases on the first message.
how you want to move the funds (card, faster payment, p2p etc)
that you have the funds available to move (not in pots but in your main account)
A selfie holding your ID to verify your identity.
We can increase the limit up to 48 hours in advance. Although sometimes frontline pushback on this. If you hit this barrier please link to this post and ask them to escalate to limit increases and one of us will review it!
Edit: also if you now try to make a payment above your daily limits you should get a prompt through moving to chat asking you to provide the information required and then it gets picked up by the team.
I always advise asking the solicitor if you can transfer the money ahead of time incase there any delays for any reason. Usually they’ll do this.
Thank you all. I’ve emailed the solicitors about sending the completion monies ahead of time, I suspect they will be fine with this as I had explained my concerns when going through the homebuyers bundle on Thursday.
Will such a large sum of money coming into my account likely cause any problems? Obviously our normal bank funds are just wages etc. £165,000 in total coming in is going to be very unusual to us, although my folks have previously sent us smaller sums (less than £100) in the past. Just wondering if we need to have the funds in sooner than 48hours before transferring over in case of internal checks?
I think my mind is in over drive with “what ifs” in case anything goes wrong!
If it helps, I exchanged and completed on the same day back in June.
Whilst I didn’t use Monzo to transfer my funds to my solicitor from, I did however do this over a number of days in advance of exchange / completion. In fact, this was something my solicitor recommended so as there was less potential for any last minute issues and they were more than happy to have the funds in advance.
Doing it this way enabled me to not worry about daily limits and also not have to pool my funds from various savings accounts in one place in advance prior to sending this over. It massively removed the stress.
The only thing I can recommend is keeping a very close eye on your completion statement to make sure that what you’re transferring over covers everything.
For example, my purchase was leasehold and I had to pay to takeover the balance on the service charge account which was only agreed on the final day - if you have any fees / costs being agreed last minute make sure your balance limit is increased to take account of these too, not just the initial transfers.
Good luck - it’s stressful, but it will be an amazing feeling when it’s all done
Oh, the other thing I’d recommend is getting your solicitors bank details all set up as a payee well in advance and making a test payment of a small, random amount to ensure all the payment details are correct. Then get the solicitor to confirm what they’ve received and allocated to your completion statement.
You don’t want to be setting this up during a stressful time when transferring balances is time sensitive. It also reduces the risk of anything going wrong with a significant amount (wrong bank account details, someone attempting to defraud you, etc.) - losing £1.50 (or similar) at that point isn’t as much of an issue!
Thought I’d come back and feed-back on this one five months on. We’ve finally got to exchange after two collapses in the chain (stress to say the least!) however Monzo were fantastic this morning. Messaged them last week to double check what we needed to do, made sure at 8am to send through photos and information, and by 8.10am the payments team had lifted the limit and payment was made.
Second update. Well, despite the exchange being simple they are making completion a nightmare. We need to get funds to the solicitors today for completion (we complete tomorrow so there is a small amount of wriggle room). They have refused to lift the limit and are now sending to a “specialist team” which may take 24 hours… Chat are being obstinate and refusing to help /speed up further despite the fact this could cause completion to fail. Followed everything they asked, explained in advance, now left feeling sick that this could all fall through yet again (after 2 chain collapses my nerves are wrecked anyway!) and that we could be £1000s out of pocket.
Phoning is impossible so now just have to wait and hope they get back faster than the “24 hours”.
Curious as to what route you went through to trigger this upgrade. Did you search for support & contact that way, or go in via the help article about increasing limits?
They refused to handle it on the phone - it had to be handled via the app!
In fairness I got a very helpful CA on the phone after going through a second time who reassured me that I was in a queue of only 5 people so it would not be 24 hours, more like an hour to resolve and explained the situation more fully than the CA in chat.
They have now lifted the limit and the funds are on their way to the solicitors. Phew!
I think the main feedback for Monzo here would be to be clearer on who it is “escalated” to, especially since it was handled differently to last week’s limit lift. They had me so worried some money laundering checks were being carried out or similar that would be time consuming, when in fact it was just to their payments team as there was a queue this morning.
I used the help article to open the chat up and provided the information as detailed by Dan above.
Thankfully the second CA I spoke to on the phone assured me they had everything they needed and they were just waiting on the payments team to lift the limit - about ten minutes ago the monies were sent on their way.
Now after 7 months of house stress it is time to relax - or panic for the move itself instead!
