Just asking this as I have been Full Monzo for quite some time now. However, I still really struggle to get the budgeting to match what actually happens during a month for me. Especially around the “Left to spend” on the summary screen. I’m always left with more money than my Left to spend says. I’m going to assume this is just me not understanding the screens so I want to ask a few questions and get ideas from other people.
Okay sooooo questions! 1. What does the left to spend actually represent?
It clearly shows my working month between salaries a nice little green circle (most the time). Then inside there’s a number with left to spend. Does this represent my total left to spend in my account? Or how much money I’ll have left over? 2. On the budgeting screen. What does “Excluding your committed spending, what’s the most you want to spend” mean?
In my head, this means how much outside of my budgeted amounts would I like to spend? However, this makes no sense as I’ve catered for all over spends in my budgets. So if I set this to £0 or even £300. It says I will run out of money. Yet I never do. At the moment I’m having to set this to a stupidly high amount on my “total spending”. So that the left to spend actually shows the amount I know is correct (trusty google sheets).
So in summary, please help. I feel like I’m being very stupid with this
Committed spending are the amounts that come out of your account regularly and you’ve set as recurring eg phone bill, internet, Netflix etc These are listed in your summary screen in the committed spending section
Do you set a monthly budget? You need to say how much you want to spend minus that committed spend
It normally says you’ll run out of money because you’re spending at a rate higher than what you’ve set as a budget eg £300 budget and you spend £100 on day 1
Search the in app help section for ‘summary’ and there’s loads of info
Do you set a monthly budget? You need to say how much you want to spend minus that committed spend
As far as I’m aware. The budgeting is all set. So at the moment on “Excluding your committed spending, what’s the most you want to spend?” I have £300 set. All my category budgets are correctly set. Also, my committed spending has all my bills on there correctly.
I’ll have a read of the help section and see if it can help me. Just seems strange as the app clearly knows my spending habbits. So me having to manually intervene and set an amount seems confusing.
For me, I haven’t set a budget up within summary so my “left to spend” figure is:
Balance minus Committed Spend (DDs and SOs) = Left to Spend
Where a budget is set I believe the “Left to Spend” is what you have left in your overall category which leads to the next part.
Outside of your DDs and SOs what is your budget? This figure can strictly be more than the total of the categories (I don’t think it can be lower) - I would suggest maybe setting this figure to say £50 above your category budgets and you may not get the “you’re going to run out of money”.
This is how I understand it anyway - this could be completely wrong though.
For me, I haven’t set a budget up within summary so my “left to spend” figure is:
Balance minus Committed Spend (DDs and SOs) = Left to Spend
I’ve given this a go. Setting to £0 then puts a greyed out amount in the box. Which I assume it just knows for me. I’ll run with this for a week or two and see how it compares.
For me I’m not too fussed about the category budgeting - i’ll have a look at the end of the month (don’t have an OD so never in the red) so it is good to see where I could save a few ££s but when I did set a proper budget it felt waaaaay to restrictive.
Now with just the “left to spend” number telling me exactly what I have left after all DDs and SOs I feel like I can mentally manage where my money is going without feeling guilty because my budget category wasn’t quite large enough.
