Money goes into pots at the start of the month (e.g. food/groceries pot), then later on I transfer money from the pot into the main account to cover what I spent.
The thing is, sometimes I don’t do this immediately, so my wife might go to the shops or I go again, then I end up with a bunch of transactions to deal with. I have to bust out a calculator or tot up with a spreadsheet, then move money across from a pot. Which feels silly in the age of digital banking.
What I’m suggesting is a ‘pay from pot’ feature where one or more transactions can be selected, then you can choose to deduct their total from a chosen pot. This would save me a lot of time and effort, and I’m sure it would do the same for others too. Even just being able to do it for 1 transaction at a time would be awesome, so I don’t have to flip back and forth between pots and the main account view to get money where it needs to be.
Took me a while to figure out what you meant but you effectively spend how I use my credit card and YNAB but in a more manual fashion.
I suspect it’s a niche way of spending. You’d be better off using a spreadsheet to monitor your spending with “pots” on the spreadsheet and then your total spending allowance across all “pots” put into one Monzo pot and transfer out as needed.
Still probably better to just let your wife know how it’s managed and she can hopefully let you know before she spends.
We split responsibilities - this is one of mine. Saves a lot of time so she doesn’t have to worry about this, and I don’t have to worry about anything on her plate.
There’s already a spreadsheet which I use to work out how much needs to go in each pot etc, and I think I mentioned that I currently do that to toatal things up at the moment - this is what I’m trying to avoid with this feature request - click on a payment and take that money from a pot.
But I think you might be right that this is niche from the replies I’ve seen. How do you do it?
People seem to have latched onto my wife as the problem here which is not at all the case.
I’m aware you can buy a subscription including virtual cards but I’m surprised this feature doesn’t exist yet and would rather avoid another subscription.
I use YNAB but as I spend all on my Amex I effectively spend on my Amex and have my current account listed with its balance and lots of “pots” for each category with a budget.
I spend on my Amex on groceries, and the amount comes from my groceries budget into a central “Amex” budget which I can pay off in full at the end of the month.
It can easily be replicated in a spreadsheet.
But I think virtual cards paying from pots might be a good route for you.
I’ve just been looking at YNAB. Does that move money from your groceries pot into your AMEX budget when you spend money in a shop, or is that still as manual a process for you as it is for me?
I don’t think it’s that niche. Or at least I’m in the same niche as you. I have a bunch of virtual cards to spend from pots, which works pretty well, but there’s zero chance of getting my wife on board with that, so I end up doing the same manual corrections as you occasionally, also backed by a spreadsheet.
It seems like it would only be the same concept as flexing a payment after you’ve made it, which works really well IMHO.
Whilst I think Monzo should have this built-in you could use IFTTT for this. You can have it set so that spending on categories will move the money from a pot e.g. Redeem grocery purchases from a pot - IFTTT
To be able to look at the end of each day at the transactions and effectively ‘multi click’ on a number of transactions that creates a total and then click a ‘transfer from pot xxxxxx’ and then press go would be brilliant. It’s basically like the salary sorter but transaction selectable I guess.