I wanted to operate balance sheet type personal accounting for an account I have where I have payments in advance, income in arrears etc etc but an overall sum to zero over an extended period. It’s a cash flow issue not a bad management or borrowing issue.
There is around £1394 income pcm into the account where I manage my disabled son’s income on the basis of a formal government appointee-ship system.
After decades of visibility of good management on this and other accounts, and after meetings and lots of information provided, this bank will not give me an overdraft on this account of any amount. They also say I am in danger of being accused of money laundering as I am managing my son’s money for him.
However, in the time it took for my daughter to run back upstairs for something she forgot for school (30 seconds) I arranged an overdraft with Monzo for £1000. No history, no discussion, etc etc.
I am considering moving all my disabled son’s affairs to this account, but I am assuming there must be some downside to Monzo’s overdraft arrangement. Why is there such a difference in approach and will the Monzo overdraft be withdrawn at a moments notice if they need to?
What is Monzo’s take on money laundering if you (by goverment appointeeship system) manage a disabled releatives money?
Accounts with personal mandate can be limiting, some do not allow online banking, which is essential supporting learning disabled and also it gives the disabled person full access of the funds you are trying to hedge for critical expenses, rent, utilities etc. Power of Attorney regitsered with the OPG however (according to Banks and the OPG) takes away all of the diabled person’s banking rights and they can only work with cash and have no independance at all compared to a healthy partial independance.
i think the idea of being accused of money laundering just for managing someone elses account is just mad. Sounds more like a bank employee on a power trip.
Monzo are quite conservative with their overdrafts (I only got £150 and I spent more than before lunch yesterday…) so they must like you if they gave you £1000. Obviously they could withdraw it, just like any bank, but unless you got into a lot of debt I can’t see why they would.
As for your specific case best to talk to monzo directly.
I don’t think there would be any hidden nasty clauses in the overdraft feature, Monzo are very transparent. There is a page about overdrafts here with some FAQs that might help? https://monzo.com/features/overdrafts/
I applied and got the maximum overdraft amount too when it first launched a while ago. It hasn’t been reduced or removed at all yet and I’ve never known a bank to do this. Perhaps in extreme circumstances such as if you went bankrupt maybe?
I had my overdraft facility withdrawn by monzo and there was a thread here on the forum about it at the time. Others had the same issue so I’d recommend checking that out if the overdraft is critical to you.
No issues with any other banks or credit cards at the time or since then, indeed it remains a mystery to this day.
We’re really sorry about this. For some, it was due to an error in the way we had credit decisioned a certain group of customers and we’ve reviewed what happened and made changes as a result of this
In other cases new information was provided to us. If you contact COps we can confirm what happened.
For clarity, these were two separate events.
As others have observed, our credit decisioning (the method we use to work out how much of an overdraft is affordable) has been conservative however we hope to offer more people an overdraft as we grow
I had never used the overdraft, however did raise the issue with customer services who then escalated the issue. I then received a message a fortnight later telling me to check noddle again.
I emptied the account, it had been my spending account however that all now goes on to a credit card. I’m hoping to review monzo again in the future but the whole experience just put me off unfortunately.
Each to their own though, test it and see how it goes for you.
I was the OP on this thread and the contributions including some staff gave been a reasonable degree of confidence. However it looks like the overdraft has disappeared from the account tab and been replaced by the button to look into an overdraft for the first time.
I have raised another post about this. As can be seen from the original post, the overdraft feature is critical to the operation of the account and I have spent most of the day cancelling everything in my other account and changing all the auto income and expenditure to the Monzo account.
I’m really hoping I’m not going to have to change everything back again and close the Monzo account.
If you rely on the OD I wouldn’t be comfortable using Monzo, sorry.
I have overdrafts on other accounts I use, as well as various credit cards that have had subsequent limit increases since the monzo OD fiasco. I also receive monthly credit reports from the main four agencies experian, equifax, callcredit and Crediva.
I see no changes or indeed any since the withdrawal of my overdraft so this is either random or they’re checking elsewhere.
It does appear from your other post to have been a bug, but I literally woke up one morning and the OD facility was no longer available. It’s certainly not reliable by any means.
