To my mind, this is so logical that I can’t believe that it does not work that way. I’ve never noticed, but I have often suspected that my budgets are not working properly. This may well be why.
I think this is were the implementation in monzo needs adjusting.
If I buy a coffe for £1.29, sure the 71p gets added as a roundup to your chosen pot but the £2 pound (transaction + roundup) gets categorised as “eating out” for example.
Does the user want just the transaction part to affect their budget or the amount combined?
I can see how this comes down to the user perception of how they want their budgeting to work whether they want the transaction including the roundup to be part of their budget or not.
This is were a simple toggle in the roundup pot would let the user decide whether “roundup affects budget” or not.
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It definitely needs to be an optional toggle if it is changed. I can understand why you might want your round ups to be categorized. But I certainly don’t. In my mind the budgets reflect money spent in that category. Round up amounts are not money spent. Categorizing the round up transactions would just result in needing to artificially inflate your category budgets to include those amounts. Meaning they will no longer reflect how much you’re actually spending in those categories. If I spend a few quid on food every day, categorizing round ups could easily inflate my required food budget by 30%.
Yeah, definitely. I’d never considered it the way that you describe, but I can see your logic. To me, “round up” means just increase the amount you’ve spent to the nearest pound. So if I buy a banana for 40p, then it is “rounded up” to a pound, meaning I’ve “spent” a pound on groceries.
But your way is just as logical. You’ve “spent” 40p on groceries, so would expect your budget to reflect that. But from where is the 60p is “taken”? I think you’re just saying it comes from uncategorised spare in your main account?
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I see round ups as being an invisible and passive form of saving, slowly trickling out of your account into a savings pot at a rate you’re not supposed to really notice. Whereas I guess in your model they are closer to being a form of tax. You spent £1.20 on a coffee, plus 80p roundup tax. Meaning you spent £2 on a coffee. That’s fair. But in my view that raises awareness and visibility of these round up amounts, which is to their detriment since they’re supposed to be an invisible and passive form of saving. As soon as you have to factor round ups into your budgeting, you lose the magic of slowly growing a round up pot without even trying.
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Nice way of looking at it, @Lewis_P. I hadn’t considered that angle, and perhaps it does make more sense than how I was thinking about things.
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I don’t use round ups for this very reason.
It’s pointless having round ups enabled if you have to budget for them with extra money on top of your budget amount.
If my budget is £850, I would have to make sure I have at least £900 in the account balance to ensure I don’t go over by the end of the month.
I totally understand transferring savings funds on payday into pots not counting in summary. But round ups become pointless when you have to factor them into budgeting…
Another added bonus. Wouldn’t it look lovely to only ever see a rounded up figure 
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Or change the budget to £900 to account for round ups.
Round ups don’t come out of the budget… that’s the whole point of what I said.
If I change the budget to £900. I’d need to make sure I have £950 in the account balance then
I get what you are saying. To me it’s an example of the fallacy that an automatic system can be made to work for everyone.
We all do this sort of thing in different ways. What works for some people, won’t work for others.
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Exactly. Toggles in settings need to be implemented so people can use it how they want to.
I personally only use summary for the bar and/ or circle indication throughout the month. I really like the idea of round ups, but for me to enable round ups I would have to give up knowing if I’m on track to not overspend.
Which is a shame. A settings toggle could allow rounds up to be added to the summary which would allow both!
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You can either afford to save round ups or you can’t. If your balance doesn’t have the leeway to accommodate round ups, then they’re not for you, regardless of how you’ve toggled a setting. Mostly because you can’t really accurately predict for round ups in your summary because the amount is variable depending on the quantity of transactions. If your budgeting between paydays is down to the wire, then I’m not sure round ups are a sensible saving option.
A form of luxury tax would make more sense in this case; for example a 20% surcharge on entertainment spending (that goes into a saving pot) would be much easier to budget for since it is predictable.
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I’ve been puzzled for a long time over this. Finally went full Monzo at the start of this year and set some tight budgets. I thought I had something configured wrong in the app as there’s always a discrepancy between actual budget and summary budget.
Seems like the only solution for now is to turn off roundups and self impose a luxury tax as mentioned about. Shame - the “accidental” / hidden savings are nice.