It would be great to tag a certain amount of the balance as spendable/not-spendable. You could do things like unlock salary on a weekly basis, mark money reserved for bills not-spendable.
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This is a big one for me – Right now I’m using my prepaid card as a cash management tool, paying bills out of my Halifax account, safe in the knowledge that anything in my Monzo account can be frittered away at my leisure.
When the current accounts land, and I’m using Monzo for my day to day banking, I’m going to lose this benefit and just see money falling out of my account throughout the month.
I would like to see something like :
Current Balance : £1,689
Spendable Balance £947
I’d envision it working either by marking past transactions as a monthly payment, or even just a manual adjuster would do (so just an option where I could add that I have £742 of bills still to pay from the full balance.
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I love this idea, siphoning off funds as not being ‘disposable’ and making it very visibly obvious how much is available to spend without eating into your financial commitments.
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I thought I’d wait & see whether anyone came up with some new ways to solve your use case but here’s a couple of option’s that Monzo have built & are working on -
If you’re an iOS user, you can achieve something similar to what you’ve described using the targets. Just set your category targets or just your total monthly target so that you’ll end up saving however much you want to set aside, if you don’t exceed them. This feature’s on it’s way for the Android app.
But that’s probably not exactly what you were looking for so the good news is that Monzo are planning to set up virtual pots too. We don’t know much yet, in terms of how they’ll work but since Hugo commented that they’ll be a good extension of targets, I’m imagining something along the lines of what you’ve described 
In other words, I’m hoping we’ll be able to set money aside in a pot to ensure that we don’t spend it. To pick up on @milleniummanp7’s point, I’m not sure that I’d want my balance to exclude the set aside money but it would be good if my targets counted the money as already spent / unavailable.
I can see how virtual pots would work for this. Here are my ideas for the different types of pots I can think of:
-Pay off debt. Used for a debt avalanche or debt snowball.
-Saving goals. Save up x amount by a certain date e.g. For a holiday. Or save x per month.
-Expenses: set aside bills. They automatically come out of this rather than the main balance
-Pay me weekly: Remaining amount of salary goes into this. You can set money to be transferred into main account so it is spendable weekly or twice weekly.
You can prioritise how your monthly salary gets divided up between the different pots.
Tagging @hugo . I hope you’ll consider these other uses for virtual pots apart from just savings.
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I wanted to bring this back up, since pots are on Android now, and it still doesn’t meet my personal requirements before switching when CAAS arrives.
As I posted above, I’m currently using Monzo for my day to day spending, and all my bills come out of my regular bank. I’m safe in the knowledge I can do what I want with Monzo, and not have to worry about coming up short on bills. This was why I came to Monzo originally.
Virtual Pots were suggested as a solution to this when I originally wrote the topic some time ago, but it doesn’t look to me like they satisfy this requirement. When I put money in a virtual pot, I can’t set anything up to come out of it. They money just stays untouched until I do something with it.
What I really want is to be able to either :
-
Put money into a pot, and assign certain recurring outgoings to use the money in that pot. Therefore I know that anything in my balance, I can spend.
-
Assign certain outgoings to be subtracted from my balance at all times (eg, I have £500 in my account, my car payment of £200 is scheduled to come out in a few days, Monzo can tell me Total Balance : £500, Spendable Balance £300. (that’s not to say I couldn’t spend the balance if I wanted to, but then if I did it would leave my spendable in the negative).
Hopefully this makes sense. It really is the only thing stopping me moving when CAAS comes to Monzo. (even better, if this feature already exists and I’m missing something).