I have read through some of the Savings Pots threads from when they were first launched, and it is my understanding that most of the additional pot features that regular pots have weren’t added to savings pots by choice, on the basis that the savings pot is designed to encourage saving rather than being used as a regular pot (and hence why the interest rate is not appleid to your main Monzo balance).
However, both myself and my friends have encountered a few scenarios where this lack of functionality has been somewhat frustrating.
For example, one friend has no overdraft on his Monzo account. He has his credit card monthly payments coming out of his Monzo account. He never wants to miss a credit card payment.
He always has to make sure there is sufficient funds to cover the credit card payments in his main Monzo balance, otherwise the payment will fail.
Automated withdrawals from the Savings pot is not possible (only automated deposits), and nor is having the Direct Debit come straight out of the savings pot.
As a result, he keeps a reasonably large sum of money in his main Monzo balance to “be on the safe side”, and this of course does not earn interest.
I have a similar situation. While at university, I have been living off of my savings. I currently have lots of my savings at another bank that offer a reasonable rate of interest, and have a standing order transferring me a set amount at the start of each week as my “budget”. It would be ideal if these savings could be in the Monzo pot and I could automate these withdrawals (like with normal pots), rather than having to remember to do them manually.
I guess that as these features are added to the Savings pot, it functions more like a normal pot or not that dissimilarly to just applying the interest on the main Monzo balance, however the fact that they function like this is rather frustrating in the sense that any money outside of the Savings pot is foregoing interest, and the lack of automated features means that I have to keep more money outside of the Savings pot than is ideal (therefore losing out on more interest than I need to).
This should 100% be a feature, I’ve got sums of money sitting there not earning interest purely because this feature doesn’t exist. Why shouldn’t we be able to earn interest on money that we know will be withdrawn at some point in the future? We can already do this manually, why not automatically?
Yeah, normal pot features need adding to Savings Pots ASAP. By omitting the features, it’s made Monzos strongest feature largely redundant, because myself and most people I know now keep all of our money in one pot rather than using pots as it was designed, purely for interest, and I now have to manually move money out when DDs/Standing Orders etc are due.
I understand not allowing you to link a virtual card or something like that. But Scheduled Withdrawals and ability to assign DDs/SOs to go out of the pot needs to happen (Except locked pots obviously).
Is the last screen shot you have possible using IFTT?
I just opened an Easy Access Savings Pot and similar to your scenario. I have a bunch of direct debits come out 2 days before my payday 28th each month. I was hoping to be able to place the majority of my money into a savings pot until the DDs are due and set up a scheduled withdrawal the day before to various pots to pay those DDs.
Guessing this isn’t possible to automate natively and has to be done manually or using IFTT?
Not all of us have access to multiple instant access pots. I have 1 instant access pot and a safety net pot but I can’t create anymore. But I agree that the regular pots are a waste of time as I keep all of my money in the instant access savings pot and have to keep transferring every time bills are due or I want to take cash out.
I’ve recently been using a monthly scheduled withdrawal from a Shawbrook savings pot. It was a bit buggy, with the future credit sometimes showing up twice (making it look like it was going to withdraw double the correct amount).
I’ve since switched to using the Monzo savings pot instead, and discovered the option for a scheduled withdrawal isn’t available. Is there a reason for this?
Two use cases for scheduled withdrawal from savings:
— Using monthly interest income as spending money
— Drawing on a saved emergency fund to supplement income
