Joint bank account to budget and monitor expenses: Monzo vs Starling vs others? Which app is better?

SouthLondonUser

Partner and I have a First Direct joint bank account we use for common expenses (mortgage, household bills, groceries, etc.) We both fully understand this makes us financially linked etc etc etc.

First Direct works fine but I'm interested in exploring one of the challenger banks, in the hope that their Android (we don't have any iphones) apps could make it easier to monitor our expenses. 

My question is: based on my needs / wish list below, would Monzo be better than Starling? Can you think of another bank app to recommend? Are there other pros and cons to each bank which I have not thought of? What's your experience?

1. I understand that both Monzo and Starling let you classify each expense by category (petrol, groceries, etc) to keep track of your monthly spend
2. Monzo also tells you who made which payment; useful when we check a statement and don't remember why we paid £200 to XYZ two weeks ago
3. Monzo also lets you set targets/limits by category, and notifies you if you are approaching them (eg you always spend £300 on groceries but you have already spent £290)
4. It's rare, but for one reason or another we happen to pay in 3-4 cheques a year (refunds etc).
5. Over the next year, we'll have to make a few high value payments (buying furniture and paying for a refurbishment).
6. Not interested in overdraft
7. Official printed (not online) ban statement for proof of address etc: Starling charges £20. Not sure about Monzo.
8. Of course we'll set up a number of direct debits but these should be straightforward

I understand that 2) and 3) are possible only with Monzo, while the other points are possible with both Monzo and Starling. Is this correct?

By contrast, with First Direct

• you can download statements in PDF or CSV format, but then you'd have to manually classify each expense if you want to see how much you have spent on petrol groceries etc
• If you want to see how much you have spent over a longer period, you practically cannot do that: you can download the PDFs (good luck searching and summing those up) but, if you download a CSV with the last 12 months of history, the names of most payees are replaced with asterisks!

Thanks!

oli356

With Monzo you can download bank statements which show the address (any classifications/categories) aren't shown here. Just a normal statement. 
Can't comment on point 2/3

Lady_Pink

I use monzo on a joint basis with my OH, I also have a starling account in my name and we have a joint HSBC account. The joint monzo is the best thing I have ever done to get a handle on our finances. My husband used to spend and forget to tell me, or wouldn't check how close we were to our overdraft, or would take money from the atm which would get frittered away and would not remember what it was spent on. The delay in transactions showing up caused me lots of stress. It made it nearly impossible to keep track of our account. Using monzo, I can note what transactions were for in the app, I see/hear the money going out immediately and can see how much money we have left. I keep the hsbc account for bills etc, and monzo for day to day spending. We have savings pots within the monzo for birthdays, holiday etc and use the personal monzo accounts as well - mine for work expenses, his for bits and Bob's.  Each month I can see where our money is going which has led to savings when I saw how much we spent on junk food trips at times! Any large purchases I would normally use the hsbc and also for paying cheques in. Of course, I also get printed statements that way which show activity on the account which I can use for Id etc.
I think monzo is wonderful, tbh. Can't get on with starling quite as well  not sure why. 
Could you do the same - use an app based as well as a bricks and mortar bank?

Hth a bit

DCFC79

I haven't used Monzo or Starling that much to answer your questions, there is Atom and Monese, I don't know of any others (there is Revolut but I dont think they fulfill any criteria or not much).  
I wouldn't tie your money up in just 1 bank, should spread it around eg at some point last year Monzo bank users had an issue with paying for petrol at Asda and they were also on Watchdog as some users had accounts closed.
Should keep at least 1 account with a bricks and Mortar branch. 

peachyprice

You can pay cheques into your Monzo account by post, just send it to them with your details on the back, they deposit it.  They either have a freepost PO box address or a physical address if you prefer. 

SouthLondonUser

Lady_Pink said:

 I keep the hsbc account for bills etc, 

May I ask why? I would have thought that paying small amounts via direct debit or bank transfer should be no issue with Monzo Starling etc. I'd maybe be worried about larger payments, like buying or selling a property, paying for a refurbishment, moving savings from one saving account to another, etc. - I would have thought a traditional bank is probably better for those payments (which are rarer, of course). Could you elaborate please? Thanks!

Lady_Pink

Just works best for us that way, really.  Our pay goes into our hsbc account,  end of month.  Most of our DDs go out start of month,  or shortly after. A couple later in the month. As I know what's going out each month from hsbc, it's easy to keep track of what money we have left. I drip feed chunks of money to the monzo for grocery shops, fuel, every day expenses.. that way, I can keep an eye on how much money we have left (sitting in the hsbc account) til end of month.  I keep the level in the monzo fairly low, really so we don't over spend. Kinda psychological really.  As the transactions are immediate and can be annotated, it's easier to see where our money is going.  It also means my husband knows to "check the monzo" before he spends,  instead of just paying for something and potentially pushing us into our overdraft on hsbc (we dont have a monzo overdraft).  I have no concerns about the "safety" of monzo for transactions,  I just prefer to keep the 2 accounts separate. Since doing this (just over a year now) I've got us out of a £700 overdraft we'd lived in for years, and started to pay debts off as we're managing money better.  It's helped me to have a psychological shift about the way we manage our money. 
It works for us,  may not work for others - I guess we all have to find our  own way of doing things! 

IvanOpinion

I really do not understand all this micro managing of money.  Mrs O and I have our joint Santander account and credit card, I put stuff on the card, my Mrs O puts stuff on the card I reconcile it at the end of the month - no big deal.  I have, very rarely, had to ask 'What is this £200?' but not once in the last 35 years, has there be any issue with anything on the card.  The Santander app delivers absolutely everything I need to manage my account (but then I don't feel the need to check it every 5 minutes).
.
I tried https://www.moneydashboard.com/ for a while (to see what all the micro-managing hype was about) and apart from some pretty graphs, stating the bleeding obvious and wasting a lot of my time it added nothing to our management of finances - so after a few months I stopped wasting time on it.

I know different people are different and what is important to one is not important to another.  Maybe I am just old, my younger brother uses one of those apps and takes pleasure in telling me how he managed to squirrel away another £1.50 or had underspent his clothing budget by £3 this month. He still manages to spend more than me since he considers these budgets to be targets rather than budgets to beat.

SouthLondonUser

I can't speak for other people.

As for me, I am not interested in micromanaging my accounts and reconciling and classifying every single expense till the last penny.

I am interested in getting a high-level view of roughly how much I spend overall and on some key categories. I don't want to know if I went to Tesco 3 more times in February than in January, I want to track if my average monthly spend on groceries is £300 or £800. If one month it is particularly higher, maybe we'll skip a couple of meals out. Etc. This sort of very high-level things.

To do that with First Direct. I'd need to periodically download CSV statements, import them into a spreadsheet or database, manually classify the expenses, and look at the results. These apps (the apps of Monzo Starling etc, or the apps which use open banking to access your account) do that automatically, which would save me a bit of time and give me immediate access to the information. That's all.

Practical example: I have connected Revolut to my First Direct account. It seems it doesn't let you change the standard classification of each expense but does a fairly good job at recognising that Tesco = groceries etc. I now have a much clearer view of what I have spent money on over the last year, and I haven't had to waste a lot of time doing that manually (which I would have had to do with First Direct).

Finally, I'd say that I'd probably prefer to use the features of a bank account like Monzo or Starling, rather than one of the open-banking apps which collect data from other accounts, because if these apps are free, then how do they make money? Selling my data somehow? If they're not free, I don't think it's worth me paying too much for what Monzo and Starling can do for free.

PS: to be clear, I don't expect it will be transformational or life-changing. I simply expect it will be convenient because it will save me a bit of time. IMHO Moderately sensible people shouldn't need an app to realise they're spending more than they're earning, methinks.