Hi there, not sure where best to post this as the previous joint account feedback threads are closed.
I’ve just got my joint account (and annoyingly not a joint account card - I got the wrong one) and sent some money from my main account to my joint account.
It seems that the only way I can categorise that movement of money is categorising the entire amount I just moved.
Spending categories and understanding your spending is clearly a key part of Monzo, if your main account doesn’t pull through the spending from your joint account and respective categories, spending categories are going to become useless again…
Example. I move £1000 to my joint account and then spend that on eating out, grocceries etc, but my main account will just say £1000 attributed to whatever I assign and nothing broken down - then it’s entirely pointless.
Do joint accounts not have categories of their own?
I really wouldn’t expect joint account (or credit cards or any other transfers) spending to be categorised or reported in the normal current account flow. That would surely get impossible to manage very quickly.
Agreed - I think keeping them separate is expected behaviour.
I just exclude any payment into my joint account from Summary in my personal account and categorise it as ‘Finances’, which is what I do with any internal transfer between accounts.
I don’t see how it would get confusing. Anyone would want to see all of their spending in one place. Using a joint account is just saying that you want to spend some of you money jointly with someone else. For example a partner you live with, all groceries, holidays etc come from a joint account. But without pulling in the end spending categories my personal spending page becomes pointless. It would be easy to attribute 50% of the joint account spending in your personal account giving you a view where your money goes. You could even be able to change the % split depending on how you both fill up the joint account.
I have only just been able to start using my personal summary page as received money has only just started deducting from categories, for it to become pointless again in a minute would be such a shame.
I think that to see the breakdown you’re after, you’d be better off not using the joint account. Nothing I’ve seen suggests that what you’re looking for is even being talked about I’m afraid. For my use it would be much too complex.
I’d want my joint account summary to represent our joint spending and my personal account to reflect my personal spending.
I wouldn’t want to see something my girlfriend purchases using the joint account affect my personal summary, and I worry it would get messy if trying to exclude certain things from cascading back to personal.
I think there are so many variations in how people use joint accounts - all spending / bills only / bills + groceries + holidays that it’s going to be hard for Monzo to fit each use case perfectly.
That said its early days for Joint Accounts, who knows what they might implement going forward!
Perhaps, I see others might use joint accounts in different ways. My understanding of a joint account is you pay for things out of a joint account that you both want to pay for (i.e. joint groceries), everything only one person pays for you use your personal account. So if your gf bought some shoes, she should use her personal account and not the joint account - so in my eyes anything bought in the joint account I have paid half for and want to see that in “my spending”.
It’s an account aggregator that supports monzo. I think it will work for you since it should be able to see both your personal and joint account and do budgeting over both of them. If you’d like to try it you can use this
It sure is, but there is one advantage to it at least. Emma can also see other bank accounts and credit cards. For me that makes it much more useful at budgeting
Ah, not sure this is going to work, Emma doesn’t know that my joint account is shared, so if anything bought from a joint account my perceived spending is the full amount, not half as clearly my gf is paying for half of things in the joint account - unless I’ve missed something
I think the issue on the forums in particular is that we all have our own opinions on what are sensible and basic things and, generally, we all disagree with one another!
Aggregating spending across the accounts is fine, it’s what I do in a 3rd party app (and have done since the 1990s). But to be done properly it would need a separate app view to be invented to avoid polluting the sole account with joint account data which would just be a mess (my opinion).
(That’s what I meant by it being ‘complex’ in my earlier post).
