Round-up style saving ... 'Coin Jar' šŸ’°

Ever wanted that cool feature that lets you round up your spending and saves the extra coins on the side?

Something I think would be amazing to have in addition to Pots would be an additional opt-in Pot that would allow you to round your spending and save the extra money automatically. A ā€˜Magic Potā€™.

I feel this is a feature that not only I would appreciate but something a lot of my friends and the community would also like to see. Itā€™s something I think Monzo could only pull off correctly. I know itā€™s been done before but that doesnā€™t mean itā€™s been done the perfect way.

How I would envision the feature would be implemented ā€¦

  • Customers can create an opt-in ā€˜Magic Potā€™.

  • A new Pot is created to the left of Monzo Card under Account to distinguish it from other Pots.

  • When a transaction is processed, for example, Ā£2.65 on a coffee, a ghost transaction follows (no notification) that rounds the transaction up to the nearest pound and deposits the rest into the ā€˜Magic Potā€™. For this example, Ā£0.35 would be added to the ā€˜Magic Potā€™.

  • This ā€˜Magic Potā€™ would work exactly like other Pots except for the ability to manual top it up. Possibly even have a feature to dump the savings into another Pot at the end of the month.

Why I think Monzo would be the best place to implement this feature ā€¦

  • One standout feature that I think only Monzo would be able to achieve would be the ability to filter what transactions roundup.

  • For example, if you catch the tube and grab breakfast every morning and you wish to have these transactions rounded up, you could add the retailers to a ā€˜white-listā€™ of round-up stores.
    Customers would be able to select stores from recent transactions to add to the white-list of retailers and view the full list from inside the Magic Pot. With other providers who offer this kind of service, itā€™s an all or nothing approach.

By default, the feature would round up all transactions but the ability to white-list certain stores would be extremely handy.

You could even apply it to a whole genre like ā€˜Groceriesā€™ or ā€˜Transportā€™.

Iā€™m sure this is something nobody else but Monzo could achieve.

Would love to know what the community thinks,

Matthew Voce

61 Likes

This is exactly what I would be after. I had this on a previous Lloydā€™s current account, I think they called it ā€œround upā€. Look after the pennyā€™s and the pounds will look after themselves!

I saw an ad for an account that did this and knew I wouldnā€™t be the only Monzo customer to like the concept.

The other option would be charity donation, such as rounding every 99p ending transaction up and donating the penny.

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Iā€™d love this! Itā€™s essentially a change jar.

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I agree that this sounds like something a lot of people would use.

It shouldnā€™t be too difficult to do either should it?

Great idea, I would love to see this implemented!

This is a cool idea. I think it would definitely make sense to disable this for some categories. Eg I donā€™t want to round up for expensed items for work! :joy:

Maybe it could work like categories now, where you can opt in for transactions (retrospectively etc) and the app ā€˜remembersā€™ that merchant in the future for rounding up to the Magic Pot.

Some form of monthly Magic Pot report (similar to the Spending report I guess?) to highlight how much was saved, and what % of total spending was saved, would be excellent also, a great moral booster!

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I know what you mean, but as long as it was rounding up the difference into your pot and you had the receipt from the transaction to give to work with the purchase amount then it would just mean accidental saving, not you loosing anything :stuck_out_tongue:

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Oh I agree. In my case I sometimes expense a crazy amount, and j could imagine that resulting in me saving more than originally intended!

Would be a great feature. I have recently started using Chip (savings account) and Moneybox (ISA) that do something like this by tieing into your bank and reviewing transactions. The downside of using the external services is that it isnā€™t done in real time, therefore, you have a larger sum taken out on a weekly basis so more noticeable Something built into a current account and ring-fences the money immediately would be great.

Would so love this feature.

This feature is requested so often by so many people, itā€™s extraordinary that Monzo has done absolutely bugger all about it when it introduced pots.

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Iā€™m looking at going back to Lloyds (or TSB) because of the lack of this feature.

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It is a good idea but an imperfect implementation with Lloyds / TSB.

The way in which it should work perfectly with Monzo is that the 50 pence is rounded up and move to a designated pot immediately that I spend Ā£2.50 on a coffee, for example. None of this waiting to the end of the day / overnight stuff.

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Yeah it wasnā€™t the best but it was done and the money went in to a savings account with a decent interest rate.

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This is the same as Lloyds save the change i believe. good idea tho it does work.

Yeah it is

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Once Monzo introduce this feature ā€¦ and I think they will, maybe they could make it have a little more customer control rather than the way it was laid out in the original post.
What I mean is make it so that you would be able to set the cut off point of the ā€˜penceā€™ that gets moved across.
For eg.
You opt in to the Magic pot.
You are given a sliding scale of 1p to 99p
Say you select 75p, then all purchases that end in 75p or more, the remainder is moved across. Those that end in less are not.
The reason I think this would be better is that many purchases are under Ā£10. Coffee, magazine, tickets etc.
So for example in the original post, if you regularly purchased a coffee at Ā£2.25 then 75p would be moved over, thatā€™s 33% of the sale. Your account would soon be depleted if you automatically moved a third of your cash in to the new pot
Just a thought.

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Yep would love this to be a thing.

Like a few others on here I manually move over the change to a pot regardless of the amount so if it is at .02 I move .98 Iā€™d prefer that myself for every transaction as itā€™s a faster way of saving.