Summary Update: Predicting Committed Spending

Once the feature is all worked out fully, the easy solution (or perhaps you call it a workaround) is for your partner to simply send all the money for the month at the start of the month. Obviously this works best if they get paid monthly at the end of the month. But if so it’s a pretty good solution. Unless they’re paid weekly or similar, there’s no real reason for them to make many individual small payments.

This is actually what my husband already does, but the problem at the moment is it’s hard to separate that money so I don’t spend it on something else - with the committed spending fully working, Monzo will do that for us!

Of course this may not be for everyone but I reckon it’d cover most use cases.

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The committed spending doesn’t reflect the true committed spending as i have a direct debit paid yearly and no longer pay some of the direct debits in the committed spending.

This is awesome. I can genuinely now see what will be left after bills. A few questions:

  1. Can you now change the future part of the pulse graph to reflect it?

  2. Can it also take into account my usual ATM and card behaviour, to build an even better picture of what is likely to be left? (Not a huge gap as these are minimal in my case)

  3. Is it based on average amounts of DDs, or just last month’s amount? One of my DDs was double last month because it was the first month. Also there’s the old “ten months of council tax” issue, at least here in Kingston.

  4. Given that it’s predicting a closing balance of £450, what does it take to get to green?!

I’m very happy that committed spending has predicted DD and regular payments, good work Monzo! However, I’m unsure of the decision to leave completed transactions within committed spending.

I assumed committed spending transactions would be transferred into a category once completed? Perhaps finances as default, but then allow the user to categorise.

Example. My £15 phone bill has gone out of my account which I always previously allocated as a bill. The app is showing my committed spending as £22, paid phone bill + unpaid Netflix.

Because I can’t categorise the committed spend as a bill, my spending is showing £15 less than it should be. From my point of view my committed spending is only really £7 so this is showing as £15 more than it should be. See what I mean? It would make much more sense if the Phone bill transferred to ‘bills’ when completed.

Jami what are your thoughts on this?

That’s confusing. My Committed Spending is categorised and the categories are changeable (under the Committed Spending heading). Are you saying yours doesn’t work this way?

My Spotify subscription is grey out in ‘Committed Spending’ and when I go into Payments to change the category, it’s listed as ‘Entertainment’ and is not changeable (edit: think this is a bug on 2.2.0). Yet, I had a Spotify sub come out last month as ‘Bills’ (which is what I initially changed it to).

You can categorise under committed spending. What I’m saying is once the transaction has completed it should move from ‘committed spending’ to ‘spending’

At the moment the amount on the ‘spending’ heading is incorrect. It’s not including DD that have already left my account because these remain lumped in with ‘committed spending’ even after the transaction has completed

Ah, OK. It sounded like you had a problem with the classification of stuff.

Hello :slight_smile:

This is the design of committed spending, so that you always know how much you have spent AFTER paying for fixed costs, like rent.

Soon you’ll be able to choose what to include/exclude from committed spending. It makes
sense to see the total of your VARIABLE spending I think, as this is what we have control over

I understand this is the way it’s designed at present. But I think the current way in which ‘committed spending’ partitions money needs improving.

To me the ‘spending’ category is for money that has left the account. ‘Committed spending’ is for things that are predicted to leave. That’s what the name committed spending implies to me.

Hence my suggestion that once the bill has been paid it should move to the bills section under spending.

At the moment there is no clear way to see what I have already spent this month and what is left to go out of my account. To figure out what I have spent this month I have to open commited spending and manually add the various committed spends that have already left my account to the spending totals. And to figure out what is left to leave my account I need to take the commited spending total and subtract things that have already left my account.

This is why I’m suggesting it needs work. It still feels very clunky.

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Hi @Jami I reported this in the app but I thought I’ll post here as well, predicted spending is working quite well but 2 issues, 1 is that it’s predicting a direct debit will come out next week BUT I’ve canceled the direct debit within the Monzo app so I think it should exclude these as the app kind of already knows the money won’t come out :slight_smile:

The 2nd issue is that I received a refund for 1 of my subscriptions, it’s now predicting that I’ll get a refund again this month and is under committed spending which kinda confuses things :slight_smile:

Hope this helps

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Thanks for this, Terry.

We have fixes for both issues, but right now they’ll only fix things for new transactions/cancellations. We’ll need to manually fix already created subscriptions. If you DM me your email and the details of the DD/refund, we can fix things up for you.

Cheers!

Hey, thanks for this feedback.

Anthony is right, the reason things stay in Committed Spending after they’ve gone out is so you can understand how much of your Spending each month is due to fixed costs, vs day-to-day spending.

Not all fixed costs are bills to people (I have a few subscriptions that are Entertainment and Personal Care) - so putting everything into Bills within spending doesn’t quite feel like the right approach.

That being said, it could be clearer how much of your Committed Spending has already gone, and how much is upcoming.

Here’s one idea we’re playing around with: Ignore some of the copy inconsistencies of this mockup, but would showing the upcoming amount under each category work for you?

image_preview%20(1)

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I think this works well. I like the distinguishing between what’s actually been spent of the commited and what’s left to come out, while still giving you the overall total.

Yes that looks a lot better actually :ok_hand:

Are there any plans to be able to exclude incoming transfers from the breakdown? I reguarly have money flowing throught account which is nothing to with my monthly budget and would want to exclude it when it comes in as well as when it comes out

Thanks for the reply Jami, I think this is definitely an improvement.

I note you’ve changed commited spending to scheduled. I agree this would be better as part of the problem is in the name. However ‘scheduled’ to me still implies future, but not past transactions in the same way committed spending does. How about ‘Regular payments’ covers all bases, simple, easy to understand?

I think dividing up the committed spending in a similar way with upcoming and past is also definitely an improvement. It would make it much easier to see how much is left to go out. The ‘upcoming’ amount.

It wouldn’t quite solve the problem of knowing how much I have left to spend though. And I think part of that problem is to do with the spending wheel. My budget for the month is £800 including the commited spending. However I usually have more money than that in the account at the start of the month as I like to have a bit spare and left over at the end of the month just incase.

Because I plan to have money left over, in the current iteration the number in the spending wheel is useless to me.

Instead I have to add commited spending to spending and take this from £800 to see what I have left. If the spending wheel could be set as your overall monthly budget it would work… I’m not sure what your plans are for reintroducing the monthly target?

I think it used to do this when Summary was still being tested in Labs, but I actually much prefer the committed spending to stay separate now that I have seen how it works.

I totally agree with this @Jami and personally I find it much more useful this way. It’s probably my favourite budgeting tool that has been implemented in Monzo so far. The ability to manually toggle/untoggle which payments fall under Committed Spending will be the real game changer for me.

A subscription like Apple Music which shows up in Monzo as “iTunes” might be tricky to distinguish from one-off purchases in the App store (which also show up as “iTunes”). Will Monzo allow me to pinpoint this as Committed Spending based on the amount/date? For me Apple Music is always £9.99 on the 1st of the month, but the other iTunes purchases are completely irregular in comparison.

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Any chance we could have the option to opt into american express prediction? I use my credit card for my day to day spending so it would be very helpful to have the prediction!

The predictions in committed spending look brilliant. It’s captured more than half of my actual committed spending. Here’s what’s missing:
-A monthly debit card recurring payment (a US donation)
-A monthly manual debit card donation that I make
-iCloud subscription (debit card recurring)
-Ocado subscription (debit card recurring)

Is the plan for us to be able to manually toggle those kind of payments as “committed” so they’ll show up?

This looks like it would be so useful.

Unfortunately it doesn’t work for me right now. I get paid fortnightly, so mine is currently having a little panic about a big bill that comes out in more than 2 weeks and that it doesn’t need to worry about.

For now I’ll stick to pots for my budgeting, but it would be great to see this work for me in the future. Would also like the option to manually add one off financial commitments, so that they’re included in predictions.