Zero-Based Budgeting

[hailstorm (Simon Porter)]

Any chance that Monzo are considering other budgeting methods? The targets we currently have is certainly much better than I’ve seen from other banks. I’d like to be given a choice of budgeting methods if its possible.

I’m a big fan of zero-based budgeting that’s recommended by Dave Ramsey. With targets, if I overspend in one month then it doesn’t necessarily adjust the next month down. With zero-based budgeting I can only allocate and spend what I have.

To date I’ve been using a program called YNAB to do this but its always been a bit of a chore because of having to manually key everything in. Monzo has me excited as everything gets categorised as you’re spending it.

[Naji (Naji Esiri)]

Hey Simon,

The ‘Targets’ feature is simply the first iteration of many other budgeting tools and options we’d like to develop. Hugo’s mentioned a couple of the longer term possibilities in the Sneak Peek Targets thread

@hugo

4. What’s next?

Well, tons of things. Some of them we’ve already started to explore, others will require much more work. However, just to give you a bit of peace of mind these are some of the things that are on our radar. We don’t forget

1. The concept of “left today”. Some categories are more likely to allow daily decisions if you can know how much budget you have per day. We’re not solving that yet.

2. Savings and account segregation. If you remember one of the premises about budgets is that people like to budget to buy particular things. We will provide for that (jars and shared pots, etc.) and it will extend nicely the concept of Target.

3. A meaningful way to explore the future. Even though we’ll use colour to tell you how fast you are reaching your targets we don’t let you explicitly check how will your targets evolve based on your current patterns. We’ve made a few explorations around it but it’s still too complicated. We may revisit this at some point on a landscape (turn your phone to see graphs) mode or similar.