Where is the 12k figure coming from? Is that to cover the cost of Plus? While that’s a lot to have stuck in a savings pot, with the old interest model covering the cost of Plus (or Premium) wasn’t even possible.
Yes on one hand monzo have removed the 1/1.5% interest on up to £2k (max £20/£30), but on the other hand they’ve also added a 0.5% boost on up to £100k (max £500).
My only gripe is the fact we can only have 1 instant access savings pot. But I do see a future where more are allowed and simplifying the interest model like this will make that more likely in my mind.
Whereas for the first time since I joined Monzo I am now considering the opposite. I can’t pay my direct debits from the savings pots that now pay interest so to maximise my return I would have to faff around moving money back and forth in time to pay bills. From one (or two) generic pots of cash.
if that was the experience I wanted I could’ve stayed with HSBC. And as my mortgage is with them it would make the periodical renewals easier.
I am going to check what the HSBC paid for current account rate is.
Confused by this too. This is also higher than the 4% Instant Access Savings Pot Monzo announced a few months ago too.
So surely that should now be higher?
Right my HSBC savings account already pays 5% so if I have to now keep everything in one big pile and move it around to pay bills it could easily be there.
I’m not sure I see the benefit here. I feel like you’ve just removed a Plus benefit from me. Yeah 4.50% is great but it’s 4% now so you’ve taken away the interest I was earning on the majority of my money, sitting in my current account and regular pots, and given me 0.5% on a pot that if I’m lucky ever has a three figure sum in it. I totally get that you want to simplify it, but it feels like you’ve simplified AND downgraded it. Unless I’ve misunderstood?
Revel’s calculation, higher up the thread. If you have less than £12,000 in the savings pot then this makes you worse off. Although anyway you’d still be worse off than having it in a bank that payed competitive interest rates.
For me; I get around £1.50 in interest a month and this makes plus worth it at about £3.50 a month. This change just makes Plus more expensive by about £1.50 a month and that’s all it does.
You’ve misunderstood me - since the launch of the pot, not increase.
But even then, it’s still lower than a bunch of other banks when they announced theirs anyway.
But they didn’t just simplify it. That’s marketing speak. The reality is, they reduced the interest for the vast majority of people. Another way of seeing it is, you now have to put more money into the savings pot to earn the same interest as before.
Something else just occurred to me, does this mean non-plus/premium customers still get interest on their account balance and regular pots? So I could cancel my Plus subscription and get interest back? Then just move my savings elsewhere if I wanted to?
Agreed. I’ll in effect be paying more for Plus after this change, and it’s already poor value.
Of the Plus features I use virtual cards (available for free with other banks) and additional accounts (admittedly probably the best implementation of any bank). Any other Plus “feature” or “benefit” is pretty much a gimmick.
So the monthly fee I pay for additional accounts will effectively increase by about £1.50 per month now as it’ll no longer be offset by the interest earned. Suspect this will be the case for the majority of Plus customers.
Agreed. I’m not sure it’s worth paying for Plus anymore. The only thing I really use is the custom categories, which I use to auto-reconcile stuff via the API in my own software.
It’s not really about the money, more so that they are taking away a benefit, replacing it with yet another one that doesn’t work properly with the export, isn’t a market leading rate but you have to pay to get it and are telling me it’s for “simplicity”
Extra 0.5% on a single instant access savings account (or two if you count the safety net).
Cons of this change:
Monzo plus and premium customers are losing a potential £20 / £30 on the combined balances of the current account and regular pots.
Instant access pots don’t have feature parity with regular pots which means that taking advantage of multiple pots to organise your money, pay direct debits or from virtual cards, while accruing a small amount of interest is no longer an option.
The rate provided for both premium and plus customers is exactly the same so the benefit for premium customers when compared to plus has also been reduced.
Even with a 4.5% you can still get much better rates elsewhere so it’s still isn’t particularly attractive.
Personally the loss of £30 is not particularly significant, but I also don’t want or need to use an account that gives me nothing back while taking 5.25% from the BoE while there are so many competitive options out there.
To add to that the patronising email and post about how interest was confusing and this is supposed to be an improvement is just beyond ridiculous, regardless of whether a customer is confused or not, I’m sure everyone prefers the couple of quid a month for having their money sitting there while they do their day to day spending.
I’m sure the marketing genius who had this wonderful idea won’t particularly care, but after 2 years of premium, I’ll be voting with my wallet and cancelling if this isn’t reversed before November.
