On my payday I move money to a pot for rent. This amount of money is then not due to the landlord until about three weeks later when on the day its due it is automatically transferee out of that pot into my current account and then paid to the landlord by standing order. However, in Monzo the summary does not seem to handle incoming pot transfers (that are scheduled) very well… if at all.
For example:
1st - Paid £1000
1st - Rent Pot Deposit £500
20th - Rent Pot Withdrawal £500
20th - Standing Order to pay rent
The summary shows I’ve £0 to spend for the whole month instead of £500 as it sees two outgoing payments of £500 (one to a pot, one to the landlord) but does not look at incoming funds.
This seems fundamentally flawed to me. It means I can’t pay my rent by automation at all. I have to manually use the app each month to move money and pay the landlord so summary reflects things correctly.
Summary is the main thing I look at in the app. It drives my financial decisions and purchase choices.
This happens to me too, compounded by the fact that I often bounce money around different bank accounts, so I have a large committed spend, but Monzo don’t know (or won’t let me specify) that I have x amount coming in.
That said, it doesn’t really bother me because I set up a budget in summary. That lets Monzo know how much you intend to spend, regardless of automatic transfers and that’s reflected in left to spend. Would recommend doing this, at least till Monzo do more work on their budgeting tools.
Why does your Summary count money put into a Pot as ‘spending’? Mine doesn’t.
I’ve just tried it. I’ve just transferred my entire balance into a Pot, and my Summary still tells me I have the same amount budgeted left to spend as I did before the transfer.
Monzo need to allow transfers into/out of pots to be categorised for budgeting purposes.
Every time I pay for something on my credit card I want to set the amount aside in a Monzo pot, but it doesn’t affect my budget so the only way around that is to transfer the funds out of Monzo into a savings account at another bank.
TL;DR If I could make a transfer into a pot and classify it as money spent from my budget that would be ace
Yea it reduces the amount available for ‘x’ days statement. I haven’t set a budget on summary and have left it as simply working out available funds from my overall account if that makes sense.
Glad it’s not just me that is experiencing a nuisance issue with pots though! We should be able to have it show as spending for budgeting and a payment when it comes back the other way.
Guess I’ll just have to manually pay my rent each month or leave the rent money out of a pot altogether.
It should be considered spending imo, as it isn’t “available for spending” in a pot. And for people that don’t like that they can utilise the “exclude from summary” switch
Yea, i agree with you in the sense it should be considered spending as it’s not then available for you. However, I’m using it to put money aside to then use on Standing Order later in the month. Your exclude from summary switch idea is what I would do… if only the exclude option was available for scheduled payments into pots. That way I could exclude the movement of my rent from the summary calculations and it would then not show £0. However, you can only exclude recurring card payments and direct debits from your summary and not a re-occuring pot move.
Perhaps this committed spending pot concept being worked on will fix this.
