Monzo, Starling or Chase

400ixl

Starling would be a good option for you.

You can set up a pot which using bills manager you can assign your direct debits to go out of and automatically top that up to the value you need to cover the pay period when you get paid. This will ring fence all of that spending.

You can then set up another pot for your budgeted spends such as food shopping and get a debit card which is only able to then spend from that pot.

Further to that you can set up other pots for savings or other things you want to assign along with setting targets etc.

You will get instant notifications of all payments in and out of the accounts.

You get a breakdown of your spending and can tag items to categories as you wish, you can even attach receipts to those payments as a handy way to be able to recall them if needed. As Starling also own their own open banking platform there is an ever growing marketplace of companion applications offering other services. One such service is to get electronic receipts and another is for cash back offers.

If you really want to be able to track spending and savings across multiple accounts, then services like Money Dashboard can give great insight, and services such as Snoop can be a useful companion on helping you to save money and get recommendations.

Looked at many of the challenger banks when I was looking to switch recently and Starling came out as a clear winner for me when looking at the features, ethical practices, financial footing etc.

anotheruser

Daliah said:

and while my meaningless credit scores have taken a bit of a hit, these searches appear to have impacted my ability to get credit cards.

While the physical number may not mean anything, the process behind it does.
Remember, not everything on this website shoudl be taken at face value.
Credit score numbers are a visual guide - no need to write them off.