There is no income. That’s the flaw.
There is within the new summary screen yes. (This is in beta)
My thoughts exactly.
So it exists and you can turn it on and see it if you don’t want to wait
Christmas and birthday, school uniforms, school voluntary contributions and subject material fees, kids clothing, day trips, school equipment, pocket money, magazines, treats
…and cat food
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I see! Useful for a lot of people then! I wouldn’t have thought of that otherwise. Maybe I’ll use it for birthdays etc or Christmas presents. I suppose a gifts category would be very useful for that though.
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Not me 
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Children I hear are generally expensive to run!
Edit: the sentence above wasn’t suppose to sound like a car 
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Me either personally. If I had custom categories they’d be:
Me
Me
Me
Me
Me
Me
Me
Me
Me
Me
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For me, family either appears under a regular expenditure category or as a transfer to someone else in the family so they can buy stuff rather than me.
Personal care is a really nice category I can file loads of transactions under. Coffee purchase? Personal care (it’s not really eating out for me). Haircut? Personal care. Massive junk food shop? Personal care. Would really like sub-categories, but I’m not mad about the new ones. They make sense to me.
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Your tone and attitude here are very unhelpful. How can you not understand how some people would find it useful to track how much they’re spending on their family or personal care? Even if the categories weren’t useful to many people, you could provide your criticism in a much more constructive way. You don’t even suggest which categories you’d like to see, despite asking for more useful categories.
I don’t have a family and I don’t ever plan to have one, but I can certainly understand why people would want to track how much they’re spending on their family.
Personal Care covers shower gel, shampoo, toothpaste, shaving products, washing powder, fabric softener, hair styling products, beauty products, makeup, haircuts, and all sorts; maybe even the gym. How are you not able to see how tracking that expenditure would be useful to people? It’s one of the most requested categories and no other category covers it. I’ve been looking forward to being able to see how much I spend on personal care a month because I reckon I can seriously cut down on it and use less of each product every time I use it.
I don’t understand what the Finance category is supposed to be for; it would be great to hear Monzo’s reasoning for that category.
I’m curious as to what you found the Cash category useful for. I only ever get cash out when I really need to (when a place doesn’t accept cards), which means budgeting a set amount of cash for a month doesn’t make sense for me. For me it’s important to know what I’ve spent my money on (rather than whether I spent it via card or cash), so I prefer to be able to categorise my ATM transactions under the correct category (which is usually impossible with Monzo because they don’t allow us to split ATM transactions into multiple categories and cash purchases don’t tend to be rounded up; they don’t even tend to be anywhere near the amount withdrawn for me because ATMs offer a minimum of £10 and I usually only want to catch a bus or have a beer).
Personally I was very disappointed with the lack of new categories, especially due to the recent update to Starling that added many useful categories that have been requested by several people (Charity, Gifts, Pets, Home, and much more). I would love to hear Monzo’s reasoning for not competing with Starling in this way. I’ve been wanting Charity, Gifts, Home, and Personal Care categories ever since Monzo allowed us to categorise transactions. It was disappointing to only see one of them make it into this update.
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A lot of people do transfers in/ out, filing them under “finance” would be helpful for people who want to move a certain amount away to a savings account- instead of having it look like an expenditure, it would work like how Emma does with the ‘internal’ category between bank accounts. At least, that’s how I plan to use it. I don’t pay for any other insurance or financial products.
The cash category was useless to me too, so this is a better name for me.
I think this thread does reflect a lot of Monzo’s demographic both in staff/ users though- it still seems very much a product for people who aren’t married or don’t have kids. The initial spending categories covered most of the basics, but people routinely spend money for the household/ for pets etc.
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Where did you hear this? I’d be very pleased if that’s the case but have seen no indication of it.
I also dislike this one, this term really doesn’t make any sense to me as a catch-all for money transfers, that’s just not what it means, your Finances are your accounts overall, not transfers to Savings or something. Personally I’d keep Cash and add then add Savings, Taxes, and similar if that’s what you want in order to classify transfers out. Another huge missing one is housing or rent and mortgage - this is most people’s largest expenditure by far, currently without a category so it comes under the grab-bag of unrelated spending ‘Bills’.
I have a family, and spend lots of money on it. I don’t really spend much on Monzo (personal account), because family spending goes on the joint account. I’d also definitely want to combine this with other categories, because it might be gifts, eating out, shopping, food or education (if we had those categories 
).
This one I won’t use much, but can see how others would use it, seems fair to me. Maybe I’ll use it for some other type of transaction since categories are so limited.
There are quite a few other ones chosen by users over here which would be useful, perhaps Monzo should run a poll of users to find out what categories they want to use, because the new ones added don’t seem to address what people are asking for here on the forum at least:
The biggest one for me (and it seems for others) is Savings, I’d like to see Monzo start looking at classifying transfers to other accounts properly, Finances feels like a step in the wrong direction, and I’m worried that Monzo is attempting to use really broad categories for disparate spending which just doesn’t belong together in a misguided attempt to keep the category count low - we’re going to need lots of categories and to manage that in the app properly (auto-hiding unused, perhaps give us the option to curate which ones we choose from while still choosing from a monzo selected set), if monzo just accept that and start adding them, it would make almost all these problems go away.
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Finances is useful for me, for all the reasons explained in their official release post. A category for withdrawals kind of makes sense, but to be honest whatever you are withdrawing the cash for should fit within one of the other categories anyway? I personally don’t make a habit of withdrawing cash for the sake of it. Personal care is also absolutely a category I will be making the most of - prescriptions, gym, haircuts, dentist and opticians appointments, etc. I’m waiting for a category for Gifts & Charity.
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I agree that ‘Family’ is odd - like @Dennison says of cash withdrawals, if you eat out with family is that not ‘Eating Out’?
I assume from the house icon that it was intended for household type purchases - so I think I’ll be treating it as such. Tools, furniture, home improvement, non-grocery consumables, etc.
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It is for me 
I consider Family purchases as anything that I’m spending on my family. As you mention, I’d probably stick to using it for essentials, that don’t have a dedicated category of their own & not discretionary spend. But these categories are for you to define in whichever way you want to!
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Exactly, but if you’re single it’s less clear what it means: household purchases have nothing to with wider family, so it sounds more like it’s for gifts and travelling to visit. I’ll be treating it as if it were named Household, which I think would be a better name anyway.
These discussions could go on with nobody ever (quite rightfully) fully agreeing on what they should mean though, until (if ever) customisable categories render them purely academic.
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Hey,
Just having a bit of a cleanup 
, I’ve merged some posts with this thread to keep the chatter all in one place.
Hope you don’t mind 