I have a house with someone too, we have joint account and have shared tabs.
Your suggestion could surely covers some scenarios but as you can see also people sharing houses or having already a joint account can and will use shared tabs hence… they are here requesting for a useful feature. (that does not impact in any way the casual user sharing a beer)
We are trying to solve a problem in the shared tab functionality, not helping people to solve how they could split expenses in other ways.
I hope this doesn’t come across in the wrong way, shared tabs can be casual for someone like you (thanks for the beer), or can be used to track expenses for a whole big project.
The idea of the joint account is actually not working very well to track how much money the other person owes you… unless both people put the same amount every time in the joint account, as soon as someone says… “don’t worry, I can anticipate the money for this …” … you will soon lose track of how much money you put vs the other person… I have been there…
Shared tabs are way easier to understand what has been paid, by whom and who owes money to the other.
but overall the issue is… I owe you something (big or small amount doesn’t matter) and I would like to repay you but I don’t have all the money but I would like to give you something back.
If I’m honest, I don’t really understand owning a house with someone but also tracking every penny they contribute, but my years of this forum have shown me that people handle finances in all sorts of ways!
If I owe you a lot of money and I can only pay a little, then is a token towards it going to make any difference? You want the £1k, not £5. But I’ve never used a shared tab, so maybe I’m missing something.
It does seem to be very niche and very little demand for this in nearly 5 years, but never say never!
When we split a large purchase we created a pot on the joint account. For example, called:
‘Ordogs half of the roof’
It had a target and meant that the other person could drop in bits of money when they wanted to. If the person owed wanted to withdraw anything they just needed to reduce the pot target. All withdrawals are logged so it’s easy to see in that regard too.
I don’t mind tracking pennies, you are right… but at the same time, when you track something with modern technologies… it happens to be down to the penny…
Very often (talking about one of my shared tabs for the new house project) if I go to screwfix and buy £3 of screws I won’t add them… but once again… it is so easy even later in the shared tab to browse what I could have missed and add it… it is really effortless.
I think that (expanding the topic a bit - relationship support!) tracking precisely is a good thing to avoid resentment and the idea that something is split unfair …
Both people can see exactly what’s in the tab, how much they have contributed and when…
I continuously treat my partner with little things that I don’t expect them to repay and they do the same for me… dinners, beers, gifts…
But if we decide to buy a house and renovate it… why not tracking the cost and split 50%? Or if I order something on amazon for the house… why not split it?
I don’t mind pennies but having the piece of mind that something is easy and fair to handle is great.
The way people handle finances is very personal and sometimes difficult to envision. I have a tab with my sister, she owes me money… she repays me monthly… she finds it easier than saving all of it and giving it back in few years time. I welcome her commitment and everything that can help her.
(just an example to what you said… “if I owe you a lot of money what’s the difference if I give you back a small token?”… it can make the difference for someone…)
It does seem to be very niche
I don’t think it is niche, splitting expenses is way more common than we think but we are used to it and we don’t think that something could help us to track it easily.
We’re sidetracking now but just curious why you don’t use the joint account for this?
We’re 90% complete on our house renovation but we’ve funded it through the joint account. We pay in £x to cover £y with spare. That is then spent on our house costs. I wouldn’t buy a jumper from it, but I would buy the things from B&Q.
No need to add to a tab, split a bill, request anything. We’ve both contributed to the joint account and now we are spending it.
It’s a consideration for sure, but to me that doesn’t matter. If I share a bank account with a trusted other and someone external owes me money and has the ability to pay me back using our Joint account, there is no problem with this. We’re grown up enough to deal with the “it’s mine!” claim between us. We’ve probably ‘lent’ it from the Joint account to begin with…
The suspected technical limitation is that Monzo’s top level account is a user account, whereas it is traditionally a bank account.
There is no (traditional) banking difference between a Personal account and a Joint account. Each has one sort code and one account number. The difference is the number of users allocated to the account(s)
But Monzo allocates sub-level bank accounts to top-level user accounts - not the other way around - which has flipped the user/account relationship upside-down and caused considerable issues, resulting in feature disparity between PA’s and JA’s.
We could really do with having this feature. The three of us bought a house together and we are sharing massive expenses from stamp duty to renovation costs. Being able to part pay would be really useful.
In the meantime as a work around you can ask the person who wants to partial pay to add a custom amount to the tab (for example £20) and put it so the other 2 people ( person b and c) have £0 and they (person a) account for the full amount (£20).
This would reduce the tab amount owed to person b and c by £10 each and person a can just transfer £10 each to person b and c outside the tab.
Does anyone know if this is being looked at as a feature? Me and partner use shared tabs a lot but it’s a pain that
You have no to pay all or nothing off
in the room is that Bill splits and Shared tabs aren’t features in the Joint Account, only Personal Accounts.
