In the near future I am going to sell my house and then buy another one. Between these two transactions I need a place to put a fairly large amount of money (because I can’t just leave it with the solicitors - they won’t let me!).
Is the Monzo current account suitable for this? Presumably I would have the benefit of FSCS temporary high balance protection for up to six months. I see from the sort code checker that Monzo can receive CHAPS payments, so there shouldn’t be a problem getting the money into the account.
But how would I get the money out of the account? When I look at Settings/Limits it says there’s a daily outbound limit of £10000, which is sensible most of the time. Is it possible to exceed this limit in some circumstances? Can Monzo make CHAPS payments?
Apart from the outbound transfer limit, is there any other reason not to use Monzo for temporary high balances?
Hmm. No, I hadn’t. I’d assumed I wouldn’t be able to get more than trivial interest on the money for the short time I’ll have it, but it’s possible I was wrong; that account looks interesting. Thanks for the pointer!
How about using the governments NS&I? They have a Direct Saver for deposits up to £2 million and all your funds are 100% protected from failure (so the £85,000 limit doesn’t really matter and you wouldn’t have to worry about applying for that 6 months waver in the event of a failure of the bank as if NS&I fails you’ll have bigger fish to fry than a house purchase). You could even put £50,000 in Premium Bonds are hope to be lucky while you wait.
Please note, anything I say in no way constitutes financial advice and anything you do is your own decision.
Isn’t it that you can’t enter the next prize draw after you purchase them, but are submitted for every subsequent one after that? I can’t remember exactly.
I take offence at NS&I’s claim that putting your money in them is 100% secure. If Britain got invaded and the govt sent to the tower then your NS&I money would be 100% gone and gold or bitcoin would have been a more sensible place to put your money. Likewise if the northern hemisphere got struck by a huge asteroid your NS&I investments would be worthless. Not 100% secure!
Sorry to go off topic. Eager to hear Monzo’s response on their 10k limits.
What sort of timescale are you thinking between transactions? Wherever you put it, you’ll need to understand if the interest is paid monthly or annually, for starters, and look at any fees, if there are any.
Don’t worry about the UK government, they are billions in debt, another (however much you plan to put away) isn’t going to touch the sides
“trivial” interest on several hundred thousand pounds could still be hundreds of pounds and worth the effort.
The fact that there doesnt appear to have been any Monzo response to this very sensible question shows that Monzo are IMHO not nearly as responsive as they and this forum would have you believe. A number of interesting questions have cropped up recently relating to “grown up” use of the current account that have received no proper response from Monzo staff.
If the only purpose of the community forum is to give the illusion of involvement then its a bit phoney!
BTW forum is not the only way to get answers from Monzo imo if someone has really important queries they better email or check In-app chat.
Monzo have been quite open but there could be several reasons for not getting a response directly from Monzo on a public forum. Hope this makes sense.
Currently, the community forum is a place for our community to gather. We make no guarantee that we will respond to things here on the community. If you have a particular issue with your account or have a specific situation that needs resolving, we can only guarantee a response through in-app chat, email, or for emergencies, phone.
I’m sorry that you feel we haven’t been honest here. SimonB, Tristan, and I have been introducing more staff to the community recently but bear in mind that right now, we are all posting here as a side to our full jobs at Monzo. This is especially true of our engineers who are busy implementing some of the most commonly requested features or fixing reported issues.
This should start to change towards the end of this year and into 2018 though, we’re looking at ways of carving out some specific time in our schedules to spend on the community forum.
The answers to all three of the issues you have presented are that we don’t have a perfect solution for these yet but please let support know if you require them. In particular, we can generate and stamp statements for mortgage applications (depending on the requirements) once you have upgraded your account.
As for the question originally presented, the FSCS do indeed provide temporary high balance protection as listed on the Monzo page of their website. You can find out more about this protection from the FSCS directly.
We do indeed support inbound CHAPS payments. For outbound high value payments, please get in touch with us through support if this is something you require.
As an infrequent, specialised payment type, CHAPS honestly isn’t something we have done much of beyond testing and support staff are not trained on them just yet.
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