I agreed no rules should be enforced, only transparency of your data against theoretical best practice. I envisage a screen showing percentage of the three categories e.g. ‘in the last 12 months your spending breakdown was 55% Fixed cost, 14% Financial goals, 31% Flexible spending’ and a nudge toward information to help users understand if that is right for them.
As @coffeemadman says, 50% for fixed costs would not be possible in London, but raises the point that if you are spending all your money on bills and day to day spending, you are potentially sacrificing your long term financial goals. Doing this should be a conscious decision, enabled by transparency of your spending data.
I’m afraid it all feels a bit abstract to me and while I may look at that sort of data once or twice if it were available, I have a feeling it would pretty soon be relegated to the ‘academic interest only’ category.
Perhaps, but there is certainly a lot of media coverage of high levels of personal debt and people not saving enough for the future. I would say there is even a moral case for using Nudge theory to encourage users to think about their finances in a longer term in respect of 50:30:20. (btw, Mondo providing ‘Targets’ functionality is already a nudge towards better financial management in the short term )
It’s the first time I have seen the 50/30/20 rule and really does make sense. It would be great if this was applied in the categories section as an additional category or group the categories under one of the three. So bills is also grouped with fixed costs or you can tag something as a bill and a fixed cost.
This does also mean you need to be able to tag income which currently is not currently part of tagging. But I think I would use this type of feature more than specific categories.
Tom mentioned that the target / budgeting tools should be available in the next few weeks, in yesterday’s Periscope chat (there’s a link to the video in the post).
For what it’s worth, I use my budgets in a very specific way which is intended to cover pseudo-fixed expenses across the year (and, in some cases, multiple years).
I’m basically an envelope budgeter, saving specific sums every month towards those costs. For the one-offs (e.g. Car insurance), the total builds up over the year and then gets spent in a lump at the appropriate time. For the regulars (e.g. Petrol) it’s all a lot more complicated since the monthly expense eats a lot of the budget with the remainder building up to cover “excessive” months such as holidays.
As a result, I don’t really have ‘targets’ since I’m not trying to limit the spend in any way but he ‘pots’ approach sounds like a closer match, particularly as my pots are generally category based. It remains to be seen whether they’ll fully support my use. A complication I can foresee is that I budget for each car separately which the category system we have at the moment simply won’t support. I’m not suggesting a change but rather identifying a limitation that perhaps will put me beyond the ability of the app to support.
The fact that I only partially budget doesn’t look to be a problem from what I can see of the Targets proposal so far.
Finally, I keep my budget money in a separate account at the moment since that pays some sort of poor interest. This is something that looks to be definitely beyond the scope of what’s currently proposed but I wonder there could be a facility to automatically cover budget categories by transfers from elsewhere as an extension of the ‘pots’ idea. It feels a bit too much, too hard to me if I’m honest but I see no reason not to mention it
Loving the app. Absolutely great. I currently use the app ‘Spendee’ alongisde my Mondo Bank. Would be great if I could fully use Mondo bank for tracking my expenses and drop Spendee. I think there are some features you guys could borrow and improve from ‘Spendee’. Especially the premium features they offer.
! I know that’s annoying but it’s a big feature and so we’re taking a bit more time than usual to make sure we’re happy with it — we’ve been doing lots of user testing with it and there’s a few tweaks to make before release It’s slated for release in either version 1.7 (coming early next week) or 1.7.x (coming pretty soon after)
As @tristan mentioned we’ve been learning a lot during the last past weeks thanks to your comments here in the forum and a few hands-on user testing. Thanks a lot!
Based on that we’re inverting the logic that we use to display the bars. Instead of showing with a line how much money you’ve spent we’re going to show you have much money you have left out of the Target you defined.
This is how it looks:
On top of this we want to adjust a few things on how Targets are defined but that will probably take us a bit more of time
@RumeeAhmed It has just been released to TestFlight testers with no sign of these features. So 1.7 will be out soon, but won’t see these targets as far as I can tell. This could all change, however.
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! I know that’s annoying but it’s a big feature and so we’re taking a bit more time than usual to make sure we’re happy with it — we’ve been doing lots of user testing with it and there’s a few tweaks to make before release 
