My Monzo Setup

My salary goes into a high street bank. Some stays there to pay various household bills (for which the bank pays me cashback), some gets transferred to savings/investment accounts, and everything else goes to Monzo. All this is automated by standing order or direct debit.

I use Monzo for day-to-day spending and for any direct debits and subscriptions not eligible for cashback from my high street bank.

I don’t really pay a huge amount of attention to budgets/summary/categories within Monzo other than to keep an eye on overall monthly spend. Because my spending and saving is spread across multiple accounts I find the categorisation in my account aggregator (Emma) more useful than in my Monzo account. I do however make use of the ability to add notes to transactions. I find this very useful to prevent forgetting the nature/purpose of any irregular transactions. After real-time banking/instant-notifications, it’s probably my favourite feature in Monzo that’s not typically provided by traditional banks. It’s a shame you can’t add notes to all Monzo transactions though.

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