Sarah here from the Operations team with a mini product update:
Some of you have gotten in touch to ask about Pots in the US and I’d love to carry on the discussion here.
To help you save for specific things, we created Pots: a simple way to set money aside within your main Monzo account! If you’ve used Monzo in the UK, or seen our UK blog you’ll know how UK Pots work.
Whether you’re planning a trip around the world, looking to buy a new laptop, or simply saving for a rainy day, Pots can help you work towards your short-term goals and wildest dreams and we’re planning on bringing Monzo Pots to the US
But Pots aren’t available just yet. We’re working on a way to share the timeline for this (and other product plans) with you soon. Keep an eye out…
But first, we’d like to know how you want to use Pots so we can make sure we are building a product that works for all of you here in the US
That’s where you come in.
Where do you put money when you save for a short term goal?
Where do you put money when you save for a long term goal?
What’s the most difficult thing about saving for a vacation?
Presently I use Simple. They use “Expenses”. I set a amount needed by each month and I automatically get money taken out on payday and deposited into those containers. Certain bills or payments are then tagged to spend from those containers. Their concept of “safe to spend” makes it super easy to budget since all my bills are already accounted for.
I use Simple as well as @Kclk. The Expenses feature they use is huge for me and allows me to easily set aside money for bills and know that I can’t spend that. Anything left over I can then easily put into a savings account or spend on things not in my regular budget.
Yes. As a fellow Simple user you completely get where I am coming from.
Looks like UK users have something similar with salary sorter and bill pots but it reads like it’s direct debits only.
What would be useful is using tags for merchants such as Netflix, Hulu etc being tagged as “Streaming Service”. You could then set up a bill pot for anything tagged as such. Furthermore if those services could then be auto tagged going forward it should always only spend from that pot.
I think it would absolutely be a killer feature for budgeting. It’s why Simple has been my go to bank for so long now. I have only been testing Monzo for a few days but I think the skeleton is there. Even now grocery stores are tagged as such with the cute bananas. Maybe a simple route to that is to be able to tag pots with existing categories baked into Monzo?
I’m also a Simple user! I’ve been with them for quite awhile, years, but am super excited to join Monzo—the main reason being the Pots feature. I basically use them as an envelope system. I have “goals” (pots equivalent I would imagine) where I put money into each month manually. I can spend it all or allow it to accrue for longer term goals. This allows me complete control over my expenses and I’m not sure I’d budget any other way, unless I get rich one day and don’t need to care about what I spend.
Simple has some expenses feature that’s been mentioned in this forum, but the automated nature of it never sat right with me. I can see how it would be useful, but I like the idea of taking each paycheck and divvying it up into little buckets perfectly myself. No surprises. I know where all my money is.
I use Chime, and one of my favorite things about it, (and why I chose it) is how it saves automatically by rounding up the the nearest dollar I spend. Then at the end of the month, I transfer it to a savings account that has a better savings rate. Hopefully when Monzo launches, I’d love to see this feature!
@Sarahm - is there an ETA to being able to share out a timeline? To be honest this was one of the primary reason for me to use Monzo (just got an account yesterday) and to hear that this isn’t supported yet is a bummer
We’re finalising our product roadmap at the moment, and will be sharing this soon! Its great to know that you’d like to see Pots as one of the first features we build - we’ve been hearing this from a lot of in person sessions too, and this feedback is feeding directly into our product prioritisation.
I’ll be sure to share our product timeline here as soon as we have it - thanks for the patience ♂
There’s a set of features that I thought would just work across the pond as they do here without any ‘changes’ granted ‘savings pot’s’ would but not regular pots.
It sounds like they are being careful that even the most basic of features suit the US market first, I guess that isn’t a bad thing.
I’m a big YNAB fan, which seems to have a similar concept to Simple and also potentially to Pots. The idea of “assigning every dollar a job” (one of the four basic rules!) has been key to change the way I spend and save.
I have been using Qapital which has been making saving as easy and effortless. I have set rules such as Payday rule - save some % of salary into your goals, set and forget rule, round up savings and health rule. It has been doing a fantastic job. But Qapital is not a full fledged bank. They don’t offer standard banking features.
If you’ve used Monzo in the UK, or seen our UK blog you’ll know how UK Pots work.
♂