Monzo - App-Based Bank

I've been using Monzo for around three years now. Makes a really easy way to monitor your day to day spending. I never overspend my budgets these days as the app always gives a very accurate and up to date summary of what is in your account. It has helped my budgeting massively. The clever breakdown/pie chart it creates of what your spending on also helps to let you identify areas where you can cut back spending to make more savings.

Great card. Easy to use. Makes spending abroad so much easier and quicker. Highly recommend.

Great app, easy to use.

Monzo makes budgeting so simple. The money pots make it easy to organise my money into categories. I love how you automatically receive notifications whenever any activity happens on your account. Another great feature is being able to receive your pay a day early.

I switched to Monzo after hearing from friends how it had made it easier for them to manage their money and stop spending more than they should each month. The main feature that helps with this is the home screen that has a very bold graphic showing you how much money you're likely to have left at the end of the month when all of your regular payments have been taken out. It may sound basic, but having the actual amount of disposable income that you have as the first thing you see when you log in is quite sobering. It also has a handy visual guide that changes from green to amber to red to let you know whether your spending is on track, whether you could run out of money to letting you know you've overspent. That's not the only great feature though. With Monzo, every time you spend, it is assigned a category and you can see where your money is going. You can also set budgets against each category to let you know when you've spent all you want to spend that much on a certain thing. Another of my favourite features is bill splitting and shared tabs. If you pay the bill at a restaurant or pay for a trip on your card, you can simply open the transaction, press split this bill and choose which people you want to split it with. Shared tabs are brilliant for if you're going on a trip with friends, you just set up the tab before you go, inviting everyone to join, then anything that anyone pays for that needs splitting just gets added to the tab and everyone adds their transactions. At the end of the trip, you all settle up and the app makes sure everyone pays their share. There are so many great features with Monzo, but one of the best has to be the ability to get your salary a day early. If you get your regular salary paid into your account, the day before it's due, you'll get a notification asking if you want it a day early and you can get your hands on your cash sooner - brilliant! Monzo is absolutely brilliant, but the one drawback is that it is harder to pay in cash and cheques. You can pay in cash at a number of high street shops, but there is a cap on how much you can deposit every six months. Cheques need to be posted to Monzo (it is freepost, but still a pain) and I don't think you can deposit coins in any way (other than at a shop and I don't think they'd appreciate me turning up with my copper jar). If you can cope with those drawbacks though, I highly reccommend it.

Monzo is so easy to use and gives you phone notifications immediately after you have spent or received any money.

Initially, I was sceptical of using an app-based bank as I had always used a well-known bank. I travel a lot so the on the day exchange rate was a massive driver to me swapping to Monzo and wow I would never go back to standard banking. I love how useful the monthly payment tracker works and the international conversion i.e $50 = £42.50 @ specified exchange rate. A revolutionary way of banking thank you Monzo!