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| Image courtesy of mobilemarketingmagazine.com |
Monzo is a brand new way to bank. The smartphone app provides real-time spending notifications, clever budgeting and instant transfers to other Monzo users. I heard about it through a friend of mine, he bought a round of drinks in one night and I saw the notification pop up on his phone, I immediately had to know what it was and how to get it.
To get a Monzo card, it is pretty straight forward, download the app from your app store and
register. You will receive the card faster if you get friends to join too. Otherwise the card will be with you in about two weeks. Be warned, in order to receive the card you do have to make a minimum deposit of £100 but this is still your money and no charge is taken from Monzo.
Once you receive the card in the post, register it on the app and you are good to go. Monzo loves to use emoji’s, I bought a Nandos the other day and my notification came up with a chicken emoji… I mean… amazing!!! Each notification you get will have a related emoji which is pretty cool.
The budgeting has real benefits to managing your spend. You instantly see where the problem lies, whether it be travel, eating out, shopping or bills, Monzo will break this down for you. Mine is sadly eating out… I have to lay off the Nandos 😔. I have to point out that having this clear budgeting can be a bit depressing too, especially if you have a big night out and you realise half of your months money was spent on shots 🙈.
In order to help your spending you can create your own targets for the month. Personally I have only had the card for a couple of weeks and so I am using the budgeting aspect to workout what my spend is for my first month. I will then try to set some targets around the problem areas. Monzo will help you achieve these targets using a traffic light system, if you are orange you’re going a bit too fast and if you are red? It’s time to slow down.
A really good security feature is that you can freeze the card from the mobile app, so if you lose your card on a night out, it’s a simple click of the button to freeze any transactions on this card.
Monzo were only granted a UK banking licence in 2016 so at the moment there card is a Beta card. This means it is still under development and still has plenty to offer in the future. At the moment Monzo is not a current account and cannot do direct debits but that is all to come and when it does, be sure to check out the blog for an updated post.
