Week One: So budgeting is much harder than it looks (Monzo, Emma)
Before jumping into my first week, I wanna start by saying thanks to everyone who read and shared my blog last week. The support has been awesome, and it’s super reassuring to find out I’m not alone in struggling with getting to grips with my money. Also a big thanks to anyone who has recommended me a cool app, or tipped me off to an upcoming app release! If you have heard of a sweet new FinTech app, or want me to check something out I haven’t mentioned, please do reach out and I’ll do my best to test them out.
Week One: Spending
As I mentioned last week, my plan is to test out a different challenger bank each week, as well as testing out different apps around that weeks ‘flavour’. At the beginning of the week, on a Tuesday, I transfer one weeks worth of cash into that bank account as well as testing out a few other apps that can help me with that weeks theme.
This week is spending, and the bank I’m testing out is the classic challenger bank: Monzo. When I transferred my cash for the week onto my card on Tuesday morning I was feeling pretty optimistic: I had just started the blog, was confident I knew what I was doing, and was pretty motivated to finally make a change.
But then I blew 30% of my weekly budget watching Liverpool draw 0–0 with Bayern Munich at the pub that same day. Without even really realising it. Budgeting is much harder than it looks.
My week with Monzo
As the first app I’ve used as part of this series, I don’t really have anything to compare against, so even the most simple features seemed incredible compared to my old bank. Due to this, I focused more on the look and feel of the app, and the cool features it has that can assist me in curbing my seemingly unstoppable spending habits. So I apologise if some of this seems real obvious to you seasoned Monzo user, but I was proper impressed.
Spending wise Monzo really shoves your transaction history in your face, in the best kind of way. Every time you use the card you get a notification telling you not only what/where you just spent you money, but also your total for the day. Knowing that I had about £200 for the week, sitting at the home after the football on Tuesday and realising I had spent nearly £50 was pretty sobering.
Being reminded of how much I had spent each day became quite a powerful psychological instrument. It really helped me realise just how much I was spending as easily, and made me hyper aware of my spending for the next few days.
But then it became a bit of a challenge against myself. “Alright, you tool, you’ve spent £50 on day one, so let’s reign it in a bit these next few days.” As weird as it sounds, it was quite satisfying lying in bed at the end of the day knowing I was below my budget for the day. I did however spend nearly every penny of my budget for the week, down to the last pound. BUT I didn’t go over. So yay me.
What I loved about Monzo
There were a couple of stand out features for me that have given Monzo a strong headstart in the Great British Bank Off.
Sending and receiving money is ridiculously simple, both to people with Monzo accounts, but also to people without. Monzo has a link sharing feature which means if you want to send, or receive cash from someone, regardless of whether they have Monzo, you can just send them a link with the amount you’re sending/receiving preset, they fill in their deets, and then boom. It’s done. Like that simple. No faffing around with sending each other sort codes etc, it’s as simple as sharing a link. Liked that a lot.
Monzo also has something called ‘Pots’, which is like an ability to hide money away from yourself. The idea is you create different pots for different things you want to save for, maybe a rainy day fund, a holiday, whatever, and then you can deposit cash away into it with one click of a button. It doesn’t count it towards the amount of money in your current account to, so you really feel like the cash has moved out the account, even though you’ve just stashed it in a digital piggy bank. And if you need to take it out? Yeah you just transfer it back, no fees, no delay. It’s your cash after all. Downside is you can’t earn interest on pots, but it seems like rolling out proper ‘Savings Pots’ is high on the new feature priority list. Still cool though.
Overall, I’m a big fan of Monzo. There was nothing my old bank could do that Monzo couldn’t, the app is slick and real easy to use, and it helped me curb my spending, at least for now. I want to save final judgement for once I’ve used all the other banks, but the GBBO is definitely off to a strong start.
Who TF is Emma
After I bitched about how awful I had found Yolt on last weeks blog, someone reached out to me and recommended ‘Emma’ as an alternative. Knowing the pains I had experienced with Yolt, I was hesitant to try another app so similar, but after downloading it and using it for a week now I have to admit, Emma is actually quite good.
It operates very similar to Yolt, connecting all your accounts into one place and giving you an overview of your spending / saving / debt across all accounts. Adding banks only took a few clicks, most of my spending was categorised much more accurately than on Yolt, and the UI is beauuuutiful. They do seems to have pinched a lot of features from other apps (Cleo’s quiz and Moneybox’s rewards definitely come to mind) but as a way to view all my accounts in one place, including most of the challenger banks and credit cards, it works well.
I was suitably impressed, and for the first time really understood just how depressingly broke I am. It also gently broke the news to me that I had spent over £600 on eating and drinking out in January. That was a little too sobering. C’mon Emma, we’ve just met.
Next week: Revolut, Tandem and Clearscore
Next week I’m going to be using Revolut, another of the more popular challenger banks. Other than their horrible company culture (“This is not the place if you value your mental health or work/life balance” — Glassdoor review) I’ve heard really good things from Revolut users, and they have a premium offering I want to check out (because it has a sexy metal card).
I’m also going to be talking credit scores - how you can check yours, why you should care, and how FinTech can come to the rescue. Thanks for reading.
