Tracking half of expenses from joint account as part of personal expenses

Feedback & Ideas
1

TLDR: how can I make expenses from joint account appear divided by 2 in my personal Trends?

Explanation:

My boyfriend and I have a joint account which we use whenever we want to pay for something we want to split the cost of equally. We top up this account from our personal accounts with equal amount of money whenever needed. This is the simplest way to split cost and we really like this setup.

However, I also try to track how I spend my money using the “Trends” tab and I can’t find a way of including joint spending into my personal expenses tracking. Consider example:

At the beginning of Month 1 we top up the joint account with £1000 each. Then in Month 1 we spend £200 on eating out and £100 on entertainment while in Month 2 we make bookings for our holidays for £1500 and we have £200 left for future expenses. In personal tracking I would want to see these expenses as £100 on eating out and £50 on entertainment in Month 1, £750 on holiday in month 2 and the remaining £100 as not yet spent.

This seems logical to me as it reflects what I effectively spent over these months. However I can’t find a way to set it up like that.

Solutions I considered:

  1. Consider the money spent when I top up the joint account. Cons: in example above it would look like I spent £1000 in Month 1 and nothing in Month 2. Also, if I wanted to categorise the expenses for sake of my personal tracking, I would have to split up the top up transaction into categories when we know how we have spent it (a lot of hassle)
  2. Include joint account in my “Trends” tab. The obvious con is that all spending from this account would be double of what I effectively payed.
  3. Some people suggested splitting each joint transaction equally into two different categories, one of which is excluded from spending. Cons: you can’t at the moment split transactions from joint account into multiple categories. Also, even if I could it would be some hassle, but definitely it would be better solution than the other two.

Any ideas?

3

You can’t unless you both have a paid sub and split the transaction by custom categories, and then exclude the partners share IE ‘Partner 1’ custom category excluded from Trends, then split the purchase into multiple, and you’ll then only see your share in Trends.

This would impact their trends though.

4

So it sounds like what you’re saying is the option 3 I mentioned in my post, do I understand correctly?

We both have Monzo Extra, but I don’t see an option to split transaction from joint account into categories, as I do in my personal account. I also found this thread that suggests it’s not possible: Multiple Category Selection on Joint Account

1 Like
5

Ah apologies, I didn’t realise it wasn’t possible.