The Monzo Family/Household

Hi all

Apologies if this was mentioned before, but searching for a few terms didn’t really show promising results.

While I realize your hands are full developing new features, I would like to suggest a Family / Household setting.
Now before people jump saying that a lot of the below could be done by having a Joint Account, i’d like to point out that some people don’t like their SO knowing and being able to check all the purchases (ie i wouldn’t want to ruin a Christmas or birthday present or get tempted when i’m on diet and my SO stops at a fast food)

I would imagine this working out like many other platforms that allow you to add a family member such as Amazon, Apple, Nest etc.

  • you could add your SO and this would create a HOUSEHOLD with full expenses listed from both accounts (helpful when one pays mortgage and the other bills and rentals for example)

  • you could switch at the swipe of a finger between YOUR account view and expenses and the HOUSEHOLD view

  • HOUSEHOLD view would still hide unrelated transactions of family members and would allow a quarterly and yearly report of all expenses (maybe with Cleaning as a subcategory as we all know that gets expensive).

  • The ability to add children with their own cards when they reach a suitable age and connect each card to a pot where we simply deposit monies rather than transferring to the other cards; in turn, children would only be able to withdraw/pay up to £15 every hour for example, with an option to set individual values.

I’m sure a lot of other cool things could come out of this.
Thoughts ?

This has been discussed over in the Accounts for childrens topic, which probably isn’t the best place :smile:

Someone said the following, which is a good idea too:

That’s fair, however the child account is just one feature.
This also needs to incorporate the full family concept and the bills sorting etc

Something on those lines, yes. The point was not to need use a 2nd account just for personal budget.
It is however the very same option i have considered and will probably go down that route.

My point was however that the “family” feature could be expanded into something more complex and useful

You need a Monzo current account each to have a joint account. The same would probably apply to the family account concept too.

We run our joint account in the same way that @anon84687262 does. However instead of our salaries going into the joint account they go into our personal ones and we just transfer money to cover bills etc into the joint account. This way we get alerted if an upcoming direct debit may fail and we can sort this without being charged.

Ah ok, i probably misread it as having an account with a different bank that he uses for purchases

Except the difficulties around kids having their own accounts. By which I mean particularly young (under 10).

GoHenry seem to offer some of the functionality that @ciuncky is alluding to? Would be pretty damn awesome if Monzo could incorporate money management tools like this for families teaching their kids about money. Not sure what the implications would be around ring fenced funds etc, as the GoHenry is clearly a pre-pay card.

Yes I understand that and I posted someones idea further up that covers what you’ve said here. That concept could easily be expanded to include further restrictions :slight_smile: