Round-ups are great, but isn’t the trend to automating saving only scraping the surface of the savings challenge? It takes an awful lot of 10 pences to amount to a meaningful amount.
Do people think we also need people to THINK about what and why we spend and turn mindless spending into meaningful saving?
This is why you can categorise purchases and set budgets.
There’s also a whole bunch of posts in the Monzo blog with loads of great ideas here:
Monzo also have a ‘Money tips’ Facebook page that you can follow here:
Thanks Ordog. No doubt these are all great tips. The worry I have, is nothing seems to be working. The levels of consumer debt is scarily insane. Categorising purchases helps, but it’s always such a grey area - is it a WANT or a NEED? What if you could categorise by how a purchase makes you feel? i.e. if your morning coffee makes you feel fantastic, that’s not the place to look for savings?
I think it’s precisely because the levels of consumer debt is so large that ANYTHING helps. Anything that can help change that mindset, even it its pennies.
I look at my debt and logically I know I should pay off the highest interest amount first. But the psychological boost of clearing two credit accounts in the last couple of months has been huge. Snowball effect etc.
So for people who have NO savings (hi!) and lots of consumer debt (also hi!) and are starting out on this financial path to recovery, i think these things are absolutely brilliant and help you get a better focus on the pennies and, subsequently, the pounds.
Just my own view. I don’t think there is a right or wrong here. My preferred solution involves a time machine and adding ‘financial’ learning to school as a default topic!
You can do this on Dozens, rate how the transaction made you feel.
You can also see breakdowns of how and where you spent your money and the times you did it in the heatmap.
I hate spending money so all my purchases would be an angry emoji 
Not knocking your idea btw 
I agree with @gmclean about it being taught at school because credit is so readily available these days it’s far too easy to sink into debt. Oh look! I can have an £1,800 phone for £40 pm month, bargain! OR I’m a little skint this month but those trainers are a cracking deal. I’ll get those now and worry about paying for them next month.
Starting at the root cause and teaching people about APR, budgeting and living within your means would help the next generation not make the same mistakes this one has.
I think there are other issues at play here as well such as the cost of living and the lack of wage growth and a very cluttered employment market.
Ah no, not this again This discussion has also been raised a few times on the forums in the past and it gets quite heated.
Probably best that it isn’t brought up again but if you’re interested in peoples views on both sides, have a quick search
Personally I would love Monzo to run some psychology research on spending habits and the like as I think it can inform everything from design upwards
I agree. NeilM. The psychology of spending is absolutely where the focus needs to be. Spending (contactless) and saving (round-ups) is becoming so frictionless, surely it’s a double-edge sword. We think we’re saving (but we’re not to any significant level) and spending is now just a tap and the money has gone.
I think card vs cash is an interesting one(Off topic!). I know moneysupermarket did research on what sort of spender/saver are you. I know that Dozens(another fintech) is asking people to rate how they feel when they made their transaction.
The psychology surrounding saving is multi levelled.How much does delayed gratification come into play. How much does as you say frictionless come into play(This I think is more pertinent now given the lock pot situation change)(Also I personally think the two are linked)
But also which works better gamifying saving (RPG it, I’ve though of a rather cute idea around it…) or alternatively punishment(interest subtraction if withdraw early).
I would love to see Monzo partner with a university and do Psychological testing on how people spend to work towards the idea of “Personalized Saving”
The idea that general saving e.g ISA, SIPP, Stocks and shares ISAs, savings accounts don’t work because of x number of personal reasons and therefore produce results that can better inform/ guide individuals in combination with education