How to manage your money if you’d rather not think about it

The information in this blog is accurate at the time of publishing. For the most up to date information check the Monzo website.

Getting your finances in order may sound like a daunting task. Perhaps it brings to mind budgeting spreadsheets, endless receipts and having to think long and hard about the sacrifices you are and aren’t willing to make.

But it doesn’t need to be that way. With the right tools and systems in place, managing your money can be convenient and bring you peace of mind.

So, if you've got other things to worry about or would just rather not think too much about your money – and aren't someone who enjoys making a spreadsheet – here are some tips.

Use Salary Sorter to separate money you receive between spending money, savings and bills.

To do this, you’ll need Pots already set up before you can sort your salary into them. Simply tap the payment once it arrives in your account and select Salary Sorter.

If you received a £1,600 payment, for example, you could put £700 straight into your rent Pot, £400 towards bills and subscriptions, £100 into your savings and keep the remaining £200 in your current account as spending money.

There’s even an option to remember these preferences when you’re paid from the same sender again. And you can always edit the amounts at a later date.

Let us take the admin out of sorting your money on payday and help you remember to save. By paying yourself first, you’re setting yourself up for success by ensuring you’ve got money set aside for what’s important before you spend it on anything else.

Remembering to put money aside every month for different things can be challenging. Particularly if saving for the future doesn’t feel like a priority right now.

Scheduled payments save you from having to manually deposit different amounts into your Pots. Instead, after setting up scheduled payments once, you can sit back and watch the money move into your desired Pots by itself.

This can be useful to set money aside for bills, rent, saving up for long and short term goals, and more.

Here’s how to set up a scheduled payment. When you create a Pot:

See all your scheduled payments in one place within the Payments tab.

With the new Instant Access Savings Pot, there’s no minimum deposit and you can access your money straight away. Meaning you can grow your savings without having to wait around for your money when you need it.

If you’ve found yourself dipping into your savings, try removing the temptation factor altogether. Make it easier to stick to your savings goals by locking your Pots. 

To lock a Pot:

You’ll still be able to put money into your Pot, by adding it manually or scheduling payments in. But you won’t be able to withdraw any. We’ll remind you that you can’t until the date you set.

By adding some extra friction, you may even find that locking your Pots makes you less inclined to want to dip into them anyway.

Every little helps when it comes to saving money. Just like a coin jar, enabling round-ups automatically rounds up your purchase to the nearest pound and saves this spare change into one of your Pots.

If you bought a sandwich for £3.40, we’ll round up this amount to £4 and put 60p away into your chosen Pot. People save an extra £129 on average every year with round-ups.

To turn on round-ups, just create a new Pot and select Round up transactions.

If you've already got a Pot you want to add round ups to, go to your Pot's settings and tap Round up transactions from there.

Take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves, as the saying goes.

It’s not too late to start the 1p Saving Challenge for the year. Put simply, it involves saving a little money every day, starting with 1p on 1st January, 2p on 2nd January, 3p on the 3rd, etcetera.

You can join at any point in the year, but you'd start saving from that date onwards. So if you join on 31st January, you’d start with 31p.

After a year, you’ll be setting aside £3.65 on the final day and if you started on 1st January, you’ll have a total of £667.95 in savings – without doing anything. Or perhaps even realising.

You’ll need an app called IFTTT (which stands for ‘If This, Then That’). IFTTT lets you link your Monzo account to other apps and set up rules to move your money around automatically.

We’ll move the money into the Pot you chose every day automatically.

You can also do the 1p Saving Challenge in reverse if you’d prefer, so you start by saving £3.65 and decrease the amount you save every day instead.

There are many more ways to save automatically using Monzo and IFTTT, which lets you connect all sorts of internet services together in useful and fun ways.

There’s no pressure to change how you’re currently living – simply tell Monzo to put money away every time you do something you’d do anyway (like cycling to work), or if something happens that’s beyond your control (like rain).

Once you’ve set them up, you’ll be able to watch your savings grow as you go about your daily life.

Some examples of low-effort ways to save using Monzo and IFTTT:

Talk about your goals with a trusted friend and ask them to keep you accountable. Maybe they’ve also got a money goal and need your support. This way, when either of you is lacking motivation you’ll have someone to lean on.

For a wider support system, join the Monzo Saving Squad and get support from thousands of other savers. You might find it comforting or inspiring hearing about other people’s experiences of managing their money.

Sticking to goals is hard, and it's ok to not be perfect. But you can take some of the weight off by setting yourself up for success.