I love the functionality of Flex but for me it’s MISSING something that I think is a good SUGGESTION to add in.
I want to be able to set a repayment amount. Currently you can change how much you pay this month and you can tweak how long it takes to pay things back. I would like to see it that you can tell it to always pay this much in. I have a flex pot that I always pay to, I should be able to do the same with flex itself.
Currently my repayments are saying I will be paying back until the end of next year. I have this month set as my budget but next month shows much lower, then lower again until I am paying 60p a month back eventually. I could pay this off in 5 months if it allowed me to set repayments for more than this month. I’m having to log in monthly to adjust it each time.
What about when you select to pay £50 a month, and you need to pay £60? Or you only owe £30? Monzo deliberately doesn’t do this as it’s not a traditional credit card.
As Revels pointed out, Flex isn’t like a traditional credit card, it’s more akin to Buy Now Pay Later. You actually pay for each transaction you flexed individually, up to a maximum based on your credit limit. Monzo just bundles each of the Flexed items repayments together each month and then you pay that.
If it wasn’t broken down into individual items, then your suggestion would make perfect sense, as that’s how traditional credit cards work. If you want to pay a fixed amount each month, you would be better off with a traditional credit card, rather than Flex, as that allows you to pay a set amount each month (with some caveats).
That would be fine - except that Flex does allow you to pay additional ‘lump sum’ payments into the overall ‘pot’ without having to break down into individual payments per transaction. I believe the lump sum than pays off the ‘furthest’ transactions first and works back (although don’t quote me on that).
Most credit cards these days allow you to pay either the full balance, the minimum amount or a fixed amount inbetween and if you choose a fixed amount there’s 2 clauses that say if your minimum is more than the fixed amount, the minimum will be taken and if the full outstanding balance is less than the fixed amount, the full outstanding balance will be taken.
So, having something the same for Flex would work fine as well.
Thanks for reminding me about the “Pay Extra” feature. That’s relatively new so didn’t remember about it.
However, the issue is that “pay extra” takes the money from your final payments, if your due amount was £50, and you “paid extra” £30, you would still need to pay the £50 (so paying £80 total). Since your monthly Flex amount could differ each month, it wouldn’t always work out.
I think (based on my limited knowledge) that implementing a “fixed amount” option each month for Flex would have to fundamentally change how Flex is built and works.
I don’t work for Monzo, and don’t have any knowledge of how it’s built within the backend, so I could be totally wrong, but who knows. Monzo have surprised us before.
I’m not suggesting that OPs suggestion is pants. Not at all. I think it’s a GREAT idea, I just don’t believe it would work with how Flex as a product is built, and if paying the same amount is something that they need to do for budgeting reasons, then a traditional credit card (or moving to an isolated pot as Op does now) is the best option.
It’s no different to what you can currently do, which I am doing, of going in each month and setting how much you’ll pay this month. It automatically decides what you pay off which bill. I’m suggesting extending that so instead of it just being this month that takes that much you can set it to all months until it’s paid off.
Then they’d only pay off what you owe. It manages to do that currently.
I do keep my flex pot topped up, but they have it that you have to go in on a regular basis to change it, you can’t even just set all the payments to pay out over that time as it messes it all up.