I forgot about the management of various accounts you might use YNAB for. It is useful in managing credit cards, savings, investments etc.
I’m still using the desktop version and tbh there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just a bit of a pain when I have to sort out a transaction in Monzo & also YNAB, but it’s something I’ll gripe about and immediately deal with it.
I’m good with money so I would be extremely surprised if it could find savings of over £80 a month ***year. I prefer a service that would offer me ads or get money from other institutions to pair me with them rather than outlay money initially.
Just to clarify, the price is $84 / year. Comes out to about £6 / month. (But appreciate the rest of your comment!)
I couldn’t find a thread about budgeting apps that work with Monzo. So tell us what you use and why?
I’ve heard of Emma, about to try it. But it doesn’t look like a budgeting app. There’s the famous ones YNAB (I don’t think they have automatic integration with Monzo and subscription model), Mint (Not tried it. Does it work with Monzo?).
I’m looking for a better system than Targets which is not working for me.
Hi @Siri ,
I found this thread which appears to fit what you’re looking for so I went ahead and moved your post here. Hope you don’t mind 
Out of interest why doesn’t targets work for you? Your feedback would be welcome here 
Summary - Feedback thread
Emma is first and foremost an account aggregator. It helps you track your spending across multiple accounts in a single app. For me, this alone makes it very useful. There are several other account aggregators but I believe Emma and Yolt may be the only ones that support Monzo.
In addition to spending tracking/analysis, they also have rudimentary budgeting tools. I belive they are similar in depth to Monzo’s budgeting tools and not anywhere near YNAB (hard for me to comment on this as I’m not personally interested in budgeting tools).
At some point in the future, account aggregators will presumably seek to be more useful by helping you automate financial decisions (e.g. alert you to cheaper energy tariffs, alert you to savings accounts with better interest rates, etc).
I don’t think Mint supports any UK accounts (although it’s been maybe 5 years since I last checked)
I use HomeBudget which seems to be most similar to YNAB which I’ve never used.
It’s all manual entry, but it’s free (or £4.99) for the full version and I’ve been using daily for over 18 months.
I like the aggregators such as Emma, but I find this useful, particularly to include household bill trackers like Acasa (formerly splittable) to include money I owe or money owed to me with housemates etc.
It also enables me to include investments etc, to get a full picture.
Found the manual entry tedious at first, but have definitely benefited from seeing the full picture of where my money goes.
Think I got into it initially out of frustration with split bills or payments skewing my Monzo targets and spent today figures
Free version:
HomeBudget Lite (w/ Sync) by Anishu, Inc. https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/homebudget-lite-w-sync/id307620907?mt=8
Full version:
HomeBudget with Sync by Anishu, Inc. https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/homebudget-with-sync/id306257910?mt=8
People on this thread are putting me to shame 
. My budgeting style has always been very haphazard - more like “Am I feeling well off compared to how I thought I was feeling last month?” If so then I massively overspend and moan about it until next payday.
Haven’t seen any mention of Tandem on the thread. Wasn’t that one of the first aggregators out there?
Being the first doesn’t necessarily mean being the best.
Has anyone been using plum or nutmeg? Taking into account fees, any sort of financial protection and likely returns which one is better or does anyone prefer an alternative? I get that plum does the whole account analytics to take out what it thinks you can affoed which is a nice touch. The Freetrade forums on here seem to have went quiet too, has that started yet or does anyone have any experience with it?
The tandem aggregator is dreadful, it feels like it was knocked up in someone’s bedroom over a few nights.
Ive tried looking through all the money management apps in this thread and there are so many. I came across Plum, the same night I came across Monzo so installed them both. Is Emma any different to Plum? Plum isn’t working just right at the moment as my Monzo account is new and there aren’t any historical transactions to go off. Does Emma do the same thing as Plum? I don’t think I could afford any more savings than I am doing at the moment. I have a Holiday standing order going to Transferwise, 1p challenge and £1 a day pot, coin jar and Plum which will start pulling money at some point.
Totally agree. I signed up when they were offering the chance to be a co-founder and get one share (don’t actually think it’s a real share), and then never used it. They did buy Harrods Bank at the start of the year, so I do expect them to become a bigger player, just probably not in the aggregator space.
I favour the ‘pay yourself first’ technique, decide what you should be saving and transfer that to your untouchable saving account. Then you work out how to live on what’s left. If it’s insufficient, you have to cut down on expenses or find ways to earn more money!
These are all quite different products so can’t really say one is better than the other
Plum auto-saves money for you dynamically adjusting how much you save based on your spending habits. You can choose to invest these savings into various funds. It also provides insight into your spending.
Nutmeg is an investment platform which invests your money into funds based on you answering a series of simple questions to gauge your investment goals and risk tolerance. It doesn’t connect directly to your bank account and I wouldn’t call it a money management app.
Freetrade is a stock trading platform. With Nutmeg you invest in funds but not in individual shares. With Freetrade you invest in company shares or funds which are traded on the stock market.
Yes. Plum connects to a single current account and moves money from it into a savings account based on your spending habits.
Emma connects to multiple bank accounts to give an overview of all your accounts in a single place (its an account aggregator) and does not automatically save money for you.
So I am liking the sound of Moneyfarm because they do an investment ISA and I was wondering how the whole tax issue works so that would solve that! Are the fees charged by these companies reasonable? Most of them seem to be around 1% per year. Obviously this makes profits more difficult? Also which one has the best protection?
1% fees is outrageous.
Say the average equity return going forward is 5%. You are paying 20% of your return in fees. Imagine what that costs you over your investing lifetime!
Stick it in a Vanguard lifestrategy, they do the work and charge around 0.2%.
I may sound like a broken record, but every academically rigorous study shows that your performance looking forward will be inversely correlated with the charges you pay.
Some people get lucky with picking investments, but the vast majority do not.
Base your future on boring predictable returns. Play with a fraction of your protfolio to see if you are the one in a million who can get a better return.
I keep on looking at the various apps but keep on coming back to Moneyhub. It costs £9.99 a year if you get the subscription directly from them.
It consolidates your accounts and transactions, allows you to create budgets, lets you define your own categories and you can add manually managed accounts to it.
It gives you the information you need to help you manage your money.
My only criticisms are that it doesn’t give you any warnings that you about to hit your budget and I think the UI is dated.
Like @DaveTMG I’m inclined to suggest you look at low-cost passive multi-asset funds like Vanguard LifeStrategy which are cheap and take the complexity out of investing. The so-called Roboadvisors (Wealthify, Nutmeg, Moneyfarm, etc) also take the complexity out of investing but they are not as cheap and I’m not really sure what they offer for the increased cost. As far as I can tell the only extra thing they offer is the asset allocation is based on a quiz (I assume this is the “robo advice” bit).
These webpages might help
https://www.boringmoney.co.uk/learn/investing-guides/product-guides/funds/
https://www.boringmoney.co.uk/learn/investing-guides/product-guides/robo-adviser/
https://www.vanguardinvestor.co.uk/what-we-offer/life-strategy-products
Regarding protection. All regulated investment providers should provide FSCS protection. What this means is if the investment firm goes bust and can’t return your investments, FSCS will compensate up to £50k. Note there’s no compensation for the value of underlying investments decreasing through.
There will be platform/account fees on top of that fund charge though (even if investing with Vanguard Investor). But yes, should still be significantly cheaper overall than 1%.