I think that there are quite a few ways of implementing something like this. One is to manage everything within the main Mondo account with what is essentially two views of it.
1 is what’s in the account, so no change from today’s account
2 is ‘safe spending’ this the account balance less the bills to be paid less any savings goals.
So, if your bills are £500 and your saving £100 for X, safe spending would reduce your balance by £600 at the start of the month. All your bills would be paid and you have £100 saved towards X.
Yes, the easier it is to manage the account without moving money from Account 1 to Account 2, etc, the simpler the account is. And, I think, more likely to attract people to the service.
That would work fine provided that (when M----- becomes a bank) your ‘protected’ £100 isn’t able to be accessed by automated payments e.g. direct debits etc. (at least without your consent at the time they are presented for payment).
I am pretty sure this has all been covered but just in case the details aren’t there I will summarise:
set a budget based on hard and soft buckets
when my salary comes in it gets divided up into the buckets.
hard buckets are for direct debits which I know are going out (mortgage, electricity etc)
soft buckets are for savings and annual payments like MOT or insurance (cheaper if you pay annually rather than by monthly DD) for car or savings for a holiday
show balance for cash available (cash which has not been assigned to a specific bucket)
when cash is running low show available money in soft bucket but warn user
etc
the trick is then to map the direct debits like mortgage etc. to the appropriate hard bucket.
As a user I will be able to see real time cash available and be able to plan accordingly.
I don’t think you need multiple hard buckets. If you mark a transaction as a Bill and identify its frequency (monthly, quarterly, etc) then Mondo would know to subtract £X amount from your balance at the start of the month.
Same thing for savings.
The way I see it working is something like
Income - Bills - Savings - Other Transactions = Safe to Spend
Safe to Spend / days left in month = What I can safely spend today
Mondo couldn’t and shouldn’t restrict spending, that’s the responsibility of the account holder but showing what’s safe to spend would, I think, help people manage their money better.
I like this idea very much. My main fav option at the moment would be the ability to 'ring fence ’ any regular outgoings (bills, DD’s, etc) and put the rest in saving & spending pots. A very simple way of budgeting and seeing exactly where you are with the spending
Let’s perhaps say there is a savings pot named bills, what would be further awesome if that all bills were directly debited from such ‘pot’, saving the need to manually transfer the money into your savings account the day before said bill is due - this would put us back in a similar position where legacy banking has left us! Entire automation would be cool, once figured out how it can be accomplished.
Another useful ‘pot’ would be for subscriptions - though these aren’t quite bills, they do occur monthly (Spotify, Netflix, etc). If these can be budgeted/accounted for, it is going to leave you in a position where you are in greater control of what you have in your current account, and thus a constraint which you know you have to work within.
Great idea Marvin
Completely agree that having the flexibility to easily create sub folders of savings would be a big differentiator
I’m the same boat as you - I want to break out bills / day to day / saving goal 1 / saving goal 2
I can’t do that now and end up just spending out of the main account,
Dom
A refinement of the OP’s idea (or possibly a totally new feature depending on how you present it) and particularly the refinement of a shared account/bucket, is to allow these buckets/accounts to go negative and start from a zero balance.
So rather than advanced saving for that holiday, me and a chum just go on holiday and start assigning each transaction we make to the (shared?) holiday bucket (ideally a bucket in the shape of a sandcastle), and when we come home we can easily see who paid for what and most importantly if we owe each other anything. It’s an electronic version of the “you pay for lunch and I’ll pay for dinner” thing where you hope it all works out roughly fairly.
As mentioned, that’s really the same functionality as the original poster but starting without (necessarily) reserving funds and just allocating transactions to the bucket as they occur, or a totally different use case depending on your PoV. Clearly there’s a hybrid case which is that (particularly if shared), you do start building up a positive balance but you then run it down against expenditure and allow it to go negative. If shared, the person who is in deficit could, at a click, settle the difference with their pal.
Barclays used to have virtual savings pots a few years ago, but they kind of faded away from lack of interest. I guess that was before Smartphone banking was a thing, and without the links to current spending etc. I very much hope this sees the light of day with Monzo - it would save me HOURS of hassle every week!
This would really be a game changer in banking for me / another thing I could use to explain to people why they should bank with Monzo!
At the moment I have such a complicated spreadsheet tracking multiple savings goals in an account that also pays bills and mortgage - my general thoughts are any time somethign needs a complex spreadsheet to track there should be a startup solving the problem
I’d also love this feature however I’d like to add one request: the ability to spend directly from the virtual account either by issuing multiple cards (choose a colour, chooses a fat piece of text) or by using virtual cards in, say, Apple Pay. (I’d be happy to be charged extra for extra cards and for custom cards as this would stop abuse.)
Then I could put £50 a month into my car account so I didn’t have to use my credit card. I could keep a petrol card in my car. I could save up for my holiday and then use just my holiday card. Being able to issue one of these virtual cards to each of my kids would be a game-changer.
But mostly, I’d want one for my domestic essentials and one that I top-up every month that I use purely for “fun”.
