Ring-fenced budgeting

[alexs (Alex Sherwood)]

That sounds good

It sounds like we might be able to use the virtual savings pots feature, which Hugo described as

emphasis mine

@hugo

2. Savings and account segregation. If you remember one of the premises about budgets is that people like to budget to buy particular things. We will provide for that (jars and shared pots, etc.) and it will extend nicely the concept of Target.

& are on the roadmap here, to do this sort of thing.

My guess is that rather than setting a Target for a particular Category, you could set a Target / create a Virtual Pot for each of your balances. When you retrieve Targets via the API, you can see that Categories are only one type of application for the Targets.

@christiaanb

When spending money the budgeting feature would work the same way as it does now, except it would take money out of the relevant budgets as appropriate. If there’s not enough in a budget it would either put the budget in arrears and let the user manually correct it at a time of their choosing, or automatically pull money from the General/main budget.

Again my guess is, just as; our transactions are categorised automatically now & we can change those categories for each merchant, we’ll be able to do the same for the Virtual Pots.
So we’ll choose a default pot for our payments to be made from (for me, my ring-fenced budget) & then we’ll be able to reassign discretionary spending to the dedicated pot that we’ve set up & when we do, our future transactions at that merchant will be allocated to that pot too.

Which could look something like this

I could be completely wrong about the way that this will work of course but does that sound the sort of thing that would work for you?

I’m slightly more skeptical about whether Monzo will enable us to automatically split a % of our salary (which Monzo will be trying to spot) between our pots when it arrives (at least, at first) because this hasn’t been mentioned before. But that totally makes sense to me & hopefully, we’ll be able to use an automation tool IFTTT, Zapier, Workflow etc. or worst case, code for this, once the API is ready.