Including income within your monthly budgets

[PhilD1 (Philip Dee)]

Just curious how people use the monthly expense budgets. My issue is that it doesn’t reflect any categorised income.

For example, I have a £250 shopping budget for the month. I spend £300 on some new glasses. However, I then receive £300 insurance money to pay for the new glasses as the old ones were damaged. I categorise both the expense and the income with the same ‘Shopping’ category. Since my income nets out my expense, I would expect to have £250 left to spend on Shopping in the month.

The issue is that Monzo ignores the category of the income and only reflects the spend and therefore shows that I’ve overspent my budget by £50. (which I haven’t).

Appreciate any feedback on:

1. Why does Monzo let you categorise income if it doesn’t get reflected in the budget for that category.
2. Any way around this so that the categorised income does get reflected in the available budget.

[Lewis_P]

I agree it’s not ideal that categorised income doesn’t offset spend.

My solution for these kind of one off spends that upset the balance of my budgets is to set them to be excluded from the summary:

Also, welcome to the forum

[PaulUK]

This is my tactic too.

[PhilD1 (Philip Dee)]

Great shout. I hadn’t noticed that switch. That’s a good work around.

What you really want is an option on your income to say: “Include within expense summary”. Hopefully some Monzo peeps can put something to that effect onto the backlog.

Appreciate the response.