I personally think that would be a good idea because there are A LOT of good ideas on here! But whatever you want to do. Sorry for blowing up this post!!
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It does make sense to move it, so consider it done 
Voting will get the attention of staff because the suggestions with the most go to the top of the list. Happy voting.
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Odd that Monzo US doesnāt have the Left to Spend tool. I wonder if it hints at Monzo developing something new to replace it. Probably no point adding it to US if it will be changed/replaced soon.
Was there an option to simply save a fixed amount each month instead of dynamic recalculations on how much you can afford to save each month?
Thanks @ordog! I voted for it now.
@lament breaks down the intricacies of what made Simpleās approach work so well for people, and why Monzoās is currently inadequate to fill the void. Itās easy to dismiss Simpleās approach of not working for you when you havenāt had the luxury to try it. The features arenāt forced on you and theyāre heavily and intuitively customisable to a much greater extent than Monzoās. My biggest criticism of Monzoās approach isnāt that itās not frictionless, but rather that itās so rigid.
Monzo forces you to compromise how you budget to work with their tools and fit their approach. With Simple, itās the opposite. Their tools can be easily adjusted to fit your way of doing things, so thereās no compromise.
As an example, Monzo canāt help with a expense that occurs every 7 weeks, but Simple can. Monzo wonāt give me insight into expenses that occur immediately following the end of a summary period. Simple does.
Theyāre similar ideas, but Monzo requires a lot more hands on management and friction to get the job done, whereas Simple does the hard stuff for you.
Itās when comparing the two that really highlights the lack of coherence between Monzoās summary feature and their pots. Summary is meant to be Monzoās answer to expenses, whereas as pots does the job for goals. Theyāre just inelegant at their respective tasks and donāt mesh well together at all.
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With Goals could you simply opt to save a fixed amount per month instead of having Simple run in some kind of auto-pilot mode and adjust savings amounts each month?
Every description I read of Simple emphasises the automatic nature of the ongoing adjustments it makes on your behalf. I can certainly see how this could be useful, but I find I often get irritated by software behaviour thatās based on predictions of what it thinks I want. So Iād be interested to know what you get manual control over, especially if Monzo looks to adopt more of Simpleās features/concepts.
I could, but itās not simply. Iād first need to calculate how much exactly. Every time (things can fluctuate). I would need to then withdraw it manually. Unless I can have a pot for every goal and expense, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep track of what money belongs to which expense without the use of third party software. Navigating and managing pots are a chore in and of themselves too.
Monzo canāt automatically adjust on the fly if thereās an unexpected expense, or I splurge on something unexpectedly. One example of that is Iāve been charged overdraft fees despite my overall balance in Monzo never dropping below Ā£2000 whilst using them as my primary account. Notifications arenāt enough of a prompt for me, if I get them when Iām pre occupied, I ignore and forget about them. This would never happen with Simpleās approach.
Iāve bent over backwards to try to make my approach to budgeting work with Monzoās tools, but it never quite gets the job done well enough for me. To the point Iām no better off than just not using the tools.
The processes are automatic, but the set up isnāt. Think of it as more like standing orders, but elevated. Simple doesnāt predict anything, which is a common misconception with their approach.
Itās no more predictive than summary is if you ditch the algorithm that determines if youāre going to run out of money. There are more similarities than differences between the too approaches. The differences are mainly in terms of execution. Simple provides greater granularity in how you earmark your expenses than committed spend affords, and it doesnāt blind itself to expenses that occur after the current period.
The automation I believe is optional and you can still do things manually if youād prefer. Iāll check with my friend though, because Iām not 100% on that. Or perhaps a Simple user here can clarify it better than I.
Take the left to spend value from summary, along with its committed spend feature, throw in the option to set goals and ditch the periods. Then create a separate pot for each goal and expense, and automatically set aside the money needed for those whenever the user is paid. Add in the ability to automatically siphon funds from a far out expense or goal if your left to spend drops below Ā£0 and then you effectively have what Simple do.
Yes, you can replicate this feature set with Monzo manually to an extent. But itās a completely manual solution, and restricted.
The only solution that tries to do predictive stuff is Monzo. Thatās why Iām always going to run out of money (Iām not). Itās why they canāt handle my Amazon subscribe and Save orders. Simple never predicts, and it never assumes. You have to strictly tell it.
I wish the product was made available to the U.K., so folk here could have tried it for themselves and see how it works. The little hands on time I had with my friends back in the US who use Simple blew me away. That was way back before Monzo was even an idea. Nothing in the U.K. or Europe has built something that felt as robust or powerful as Simple.
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If thatās the case, I think that basic omission of a standard way too save would have put me off using it in spite of the other smarts.
I thought they do now?
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Manually as noted above by @N26throwaway. Automatically if you either choose to fund this goal every day or every pay period.
Oh sorry. I guess I was looking for something called Left to Spend. Iām on day 2 of the app. 
That said, this feature is missing the ability to reset every 2 weeks, which was in line with how I used Simple (expenses and goals come out with every paycheck). Iām only seeing the ability to reset at the 1st of the month, every week, or every 4 weeks.
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Ah no worries!
In the UK, there is a Left to Spend feature - I think the US version that I linked to works off of budgets rather than whatās in your account though.
Maybe @thomasageorge or @DillonV can confirm?
In any event, Monzo US is definitely a work in progress - feedback on here is really important, so let us know how you get on with it!
I think what Iām asking maybe isnāt coming across clearly.
With most (I thought all) banks you can choose to setup a regular scheduled payment to a savings account/pot/goal of a fixed amount. For example, transfer $100 to savings account every week or every month, or whatever. No matter what else if going on in your account that transfer will stay the same amount every time (unless you have no money in checking account, in which case it would fail).
Based on the descriptions Iāve heard of Simple Goals my understanding is Simple would dynamically adjust the amount that is being transferred to the goal based on other things thatās happening in a particular month (how much income you have in that month, how much outgoings you have, etc) and you couldnāt just tell it to transfer a fixed $100 every month regardless of what else is happening. Is that correct?
This short video explaining the feature might answer your questions a bit better than trying to explain how it works with text.
I think youāve slightly misunderstood the process a bit here. Simple dynamically adjusts the amount in order to reach your goal by the deadline you set. Other factors only influence which goals it prioritises. For example, if there isnāt enough to cover all of your goals, it will prioritise those with a nearer deadline. If you fall behind schedule, then it can of course increase the amount of the transfers to keep it on target if you want it too. You also donāt have to fund the goals in this automated way if you donāt want to.
Thereās an important distinction to bear in mind here though. Goals are not like pots. The money is still there and can be spent in a pinch as it remains a part of your available balance.
I canāt stress enough that the entire feature set surrounding goals and expenses is just Monzoās summary but on steroids. Itās nothing at all like the functionality we get from pots. I just believe that Monzo could utilise their pots to achieve similar, but superior functionality, in the form of a middle ground that provides the best of both worlds. But to achieve that, summary and pots need a much more cohesive integration with one another.
You can certainly make custom transfers, but Iām not sure if you can automate them like that. Iāll share a few links below to a few FAQ pages that should hopefully provide you with greater clarity and clear up any confusion or questions you still have.
https://www.simple.com/help/articles/goals/using-goals
https://www.simple.com/help/articles/goals/goals
ETA: The quickest and simplest interim solution Monzo could deploy to make the current version of summary good enough to be a reasonable replacement for simple would be to enable the ability to set a two week budgeting period. More fluidity what constitutes a period for both income and committed spend in general would be welcomed too. But longer term, I think the idea of periods is a notion we should move away from because I feel they hinder the capability of the feature. I really canāt fathom why we donāt just have a custom picker for these things yet where we can choose a number and then either day, week, month, or year, for example:
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I think I understand it, and I can see how the behaviour could be helpful for many. I would just dislike not having the option of scheduling fixed regular contributions to goals that canāt be dynamically adjusted by the app.
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This is a huge piece of the puzzle, right?
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I go into a grocery store Iāve never been in. Thereās $400 in my grocery pot and $5 in my Left to Spend. Thereās also a line. No one wants to wait for me to go into a pot and release funds before I can pay. With Simple, I pay, it checks the account to make sure I can cover the purchase, and we move on. Then, when I get home, I can say āfund this purchase from my groceries.ā
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I have $1100 in Impreza: Tuneup fund. With taxes, it comes out to $1153 (happened today). I pay with the card, Simple checks, and sees that I have ample funds in my account to pay the bill, and Iām out. I get home and go over my finances to determine where Iām going to pull that extra $53 from, and add it to the Impreza: Tuneup fund. Now that it has enough money, in the envelope, I tell Simple to fund the transaction from Impreza: Tuneup.
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I too have been using Simple for a while. I joined in very early 2016 and was just looking for a 100% online bank. I had no idea I would be finding the most amazing automated tool that literally changed my familyās financial life.
I have to remind myself that all of the tools they have now have been built over time. They were not all there in 2016. In fact, it wasnāt until 2019 that I was able to get my wife on Simple with me, and it was another 6 months before we created a joint account.
However, like @zoomiez , the joint account has become THE critical lynchpin to my wife and me working TOGETHER on our family budget, financial goals, etc. Before this, it was a lot of checking each others notes. It was hard for both of us to shop from a single bucket, such as groceries. We were constantly sending money back and forth to cover expenses paid out by the person who didnāt own the bucket. Now that we have the joint account, things really do just flow. We use the joint account for 90-95% of our finances, and the personal accounts are reserved for fun money and stuff we want to hide (like anniversary gifts).
Unlike Zoomiez, the second most important part of our financial peace is the full-automation. My paycheck comes in on Wednesday, and automatically gets divvied up into all of the buckets. I have read posts from a lot of folks out there who are like, ājust do it yourself!ā And I get that this works really well for them, but for us, having the automation save us hours in moving funds every week is great.
And there are a variety of other really powerful automation features.
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No-Cap Funding
For instance, for our āmedical expensesā bucket that covers things like prescription and doctor copays, we just add $25/week into that bucket, come rain or shine. It builds until someone needs to spend it or we decide maybe thereās a bit too much in there and reallocate some of the funds for another purpose. -
Fixed-Cap Funding
We have another bill that is exactly $500/month, every month, so Simple adds enough funds every paycheck to make sure that $500 is in that bucket on the day it is due. Simple checks to see how many paydays are in the month (I get paid weekly, so it will be either 4 or 5) and then it will either put $125 or $100 into the bucket each paycheck. -
Automatic Payments
When an expense with a bucket dedicated to it comes through (and at this point, ALL of my recurring bills have individual buckets), that bill will automatically get paid from the appropriate bucket; mobile phone from the phone bucket, electricity from electricity bucket, etc.
All I have to do is pop on once a day to make sure nothing came through that didnāt get paid for from the appropriate bucket.
- No Declines (if the funds exist)
AND, this is the best part, letās say I only had $20 in safe to spend, and a grocery charge came through for $70 from a store weād never been to. Because Simple doesnāt know this is a grocery charge and should be paid for from the grocery bucket, it will give me time to figure it out. Instead of declining the charge, it checks to see if we have enough TOTAL funds in our account to cover it, and if we do, Simple accepts the charge. In this case, it would put my safe-to-spend at -$50. Later, I can log in and tell Simple to apply the charge to the grocery bucket, at which point my grocery bucket is reduced by $70, and safe-to-spend returns to +$20.
This last part is really critical because my wife is the one most likely to not pay attention to the buckets right away, and if our bank that would decline a purchase that we had TOTAL funds for until she went into the app to free up those funds, she would either blow up the buckets, or more likely, move to another bank entirely. Another example: We often have less than $150 in our safe-to-spend, but we also usually have more than $15k in our shared checking account between goals and expenses. When grocery shopping day comes around each week, we will often hit three or four stores in rapid succession and also fill up with gas. Having to stop and move funds before being able to make a purchase really does seem asinine. It is much easier to simply make the purchases and then sort out anything afterward that needs sorting.
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You can actually do this very easily with Simple.
Simple allows you to set up a variety of funding schedules. Most people use their payday. For me, for the past two years, payday has been weekly, every Wednesday, but with a new job, I have adjusted that to every Friday (still weekly).
However, I can also set up different funding schedules, such as once per month, or every other week, or whatever else I may want. These schedules can be applied to both goals and expenses.
Goals have a defined amount and ending and do not recur (i.e, $600 by August 17th).
Expenses have a defined amount and recurrence, but there are two types:
Target-amount expenses recur every funding cycle, setting aside the target amount and letting it pile up as high as youād like to go. This is your simple ā($amount) per (funding period) and never stopā tool; i.e., $25 per week, $100 per paycheck, etc.
Target-balance expenses have an amount and date needed (i.e., $250 every Wednesday, or $1500 on the first of each month). These types of expenses are funded until they reach their numbers, and then hold until they are spent. For instance, I have a recurring goal of $100 for my electric bill. If this monthās bill is $85, it will leave $15 in the account. When Simple notes that my next bill is 4 paychecks away and that I only have $15 but need $100, it will do the math ($100-$15=$85 needed, divide that by 4 paychecks, and fund at $21.25 per paycheck for the next four paychecks). Absolutely brilliant. Makes me cry.
Back to your question. If I really wanted to set up something that ignores my paychecks and arbitrarily gets funded on, letās just say the 3rd of every month, to the tune of $100, I could do this fairly simply. I would want a really good reason for saving $100/month off-cycle from my paycheck before doing this, but depending on your end goal, there are several ways to go:
First, you need to create a funding cycle that runs the 3rd of every month.
If you wanted to hit $1200 at the end of the year and stop, you could set up either be a goal or a target-balance expense of $1200, to be completed by December 31st, using the ā3rd of monthā funding schedule.
If you wanted this to just pile up $100/month continuously and never stop, it would have to be a target-amount expense of $100 using the ā3rd of monthā schedule.
Most of the time, if there wasnāt a need for arbitrary once-per-month funding, Simple users would approach it several other ways.
For instance, if this was a $100/month bill that would get paid out every month and then start over, I would likely set it up as a target-balance expense to be funded every paycheck. In intervals with 4 paychecks between billings, it would put away $25 per paycheck, and on those rare cycles with 5 paychecks in between, it would put away $20. This would cause less friction with my overall budgeting since it takes smaller bites out of my weekly paycheck rather than a large $100 bite once per month.
On the other hand, if the goal was to save $1200 for the year, I could set up either a $1200 goal or a target-balance expense that funded weekly at $23.08, either of which would stop funding when the goal was met.
If the purpose was to put away $1200 yearly and let it pile up, I would probably use a target-amount expense (calculated manually) of $23.08 that again, funded weekly, but would never stop.
The main difference with these is that the tighter funding schedules take small bites per paycheck rather than waiting to see if there was a full $100/month to come out.
If you did that with one or two items, it probably wouldnāt be that big a deal, but when you set up dozens of items, taking smaller bites when you get paid provides much more clarity, since funds are sitting in their buckets rather than milling around in a general pool for weeks waiting for a monthly schedule to run.
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Nothing very constructive to add but just wanted to say that Simple really does/did sound incredible.
Would be very cool if Monzo picked up some of the features you mentioned above.
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@Aithene thanks for detailed overview
And could you disable any ability for Simple to adjust the amount that is contributed each month or the ability to borrow from these goals/expenses to fund shortfalls elsewhere?
From the various descriptions in this thread and other threads, I get that Simple was incredibly powerful. I also wonder though why its shutting down. And I wonder if part of the reason is it was perhaps harder with Simple to do certain things that people took for granted at more traditional banks, such as (but perhaps not limited to) funding a savings account/pot with a fixed/non-variable monthly amount. Perhaps its smarts only apealed to a relatively small niche.
Similary, Monzo UK certainly isnāt well-suited to individuals who have a regular need for making cash or check deposits.
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When you talk about adjusting, the idea of ādisablingā doesnāt really fit for goals and target-balance expenses. If I say I need $1200 by December 31st, or I need my electric bill funded by the 15th of the month, then Simple will do its best to make sure that happens. It simply looks at the remaining funds needed and the remaining number of funding cycles left in the time allotted and does its thing. Anything else pretty much breaks the whole concept.
I have never come in under budget in this sort of regard, so donāt know if the target-amount expenses are affected by a shortfall. Iām pretty sure that goals will get defunded before any expense type since expenses are generally bills. And that if you donāt have enough to fund your expenses, expenses with nearer dates get priority.
I get the feeling that perhaps until you use the tool, it sounds worse than youād think. Like, anti-lock breaks. āBrakes that intermittently RELEASE while Iām trying to stop?ā But once you use them and understand them, they are kind of a no-brainer.
BBVA wants to sell off its US-based businesses, and it is streamlining its entire infrastructure. Since Simple was basically sitting on top of the BBVA banking structure, I guess it seemed like a good idea to simply dissolve it and absorb all of the accounts into its main organization. I think there are a lot of us hoping that they adopt a lot of Simpleās technology into their own online app. Weāll see
Look, if you are the kind of person who needs to work all of the levers all the time in order to make your budget work, either due to circumstances or personality type, I can see why full automation like this would look like a step backward in the control area. However, having a job, a side hustle, and a family, the last thing I wanted was something I had to adjust all of the time. I have had periods of my life where the funds were tight, and I needed to micromanage every cent, so no judgment there. Simple helps really well with people who want extra help with their budgets and it is outstanding for people who are able to live within their budget and just want to set it up and let it run pretty flawlessly. Thatās where I am, and Iām looking for something that will continue to provide that experience.
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