The future of banking with Monzo

Image courtesy of mobilemarketingmagazine.com

It’s always difficult to keep an up-to- date tally of your finances, especially if you regularly pay for things using a card. It can sometimes take banks days to update your balance and before you know it your money has gone and your balance is zero, or worse! In the negative….😩

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.

Keeping fit with the new Fibit Charge 2

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I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas break and I wish you all a very happy new year. I spent my break eating too much, drinking too much and being a couch potato. Inevitably it’s the New Year so I will be following the trend and trying to regain my fitness, eat healthier and drink a lot less. Luckily for me I received a new Fitbit Charge 2 to help my efforts.

I haven’t used a Fitbit before but my mum and girlfriend have the original one. They are always trying to make me go for walks with them in order to get their 10,000 steps and I never really understood the motivation for it until receiving one for myself.

In order to utilise the Fitbit watch you will need to download the app, which is fully compatible with iOS, Android & Windows phones and can be synchronised with ‘My Fitness Pal’. The app provides a dashboard of today’s steps, distance walked, heart rate, calories burnt and active minutes. This is all customisable as is the display on the watch. It also adds a competitive edge when you have your friends group wearing the watch as it keeps a running total of steps for the week. You’re able to taunt and motivate them too which is a little added fun.

The Fitbit charge 2 has really come along since the original watch, the new design looks slick, the battery life lasts up to five days, it comes with a customisable screen and you can change the straps. To run through the watches features you simply press the button on the left hand side.

In my opinion one of the best features is Exercise. If you know you are performing some exercise; be it the gym, a run, tennis, football you can go to the exercise feature and it will capture the distance you have travelled, heart rate, calories burned, overall time of workout and the impact the workout has had on your day. All of this is displayed in a really easy to view graphical display which I found brilliant. These workouts are all stored on the app and you can access them at anytime if you wanted to use them as a benchmark.

The exercise feature can be customised on the app to show your 7 most common workouts, the list of workouts is a little limited as it only includes two sports which are Golf and Tennis. However if you are doing an activity such as football, rugby etc. you can just use the ‘Workout’ or ‘Run’ option.

If you sit in an office all day like myself you may find the hourly activity feature really useful. This feature will set you little goals every hour in order to give you a short break from staring at the dull spreadsheets your brain is being frazzled by and give you that boost you needed to tackle the rest of your working day.

So if you’re looking for a device which provides you with health stats personalised to you and wish to make a healthier change in the new year, why not treat yourself in the January sales and purchase one of the Fitbit range.

Win Big with Raffler

Image courtesy of https://raffler.co/

Do you want the chance to win £1000 a day for 1 minute of your time? What's the catch? there is none!

Raffler is an application for both iOS and Android that enables to you to potentially win real money each day for watching two adverts. There is no charges included whatsoever. Everyday at 7:00 PM GTM there is a raffle where you have a chance of winning at least £1000.

To take part and be entered all you have to do is watch two thirty second adverts consecutively and then you are given your Raffler number ready for the next draw. It's important to check back after the draw to see if you've won as the winnings will rollover to the next day's raffle, leaving you penny less.

Recently Raffler have introduced 'Tenner Tuesdays' and 'Thirsty Thursdays', whereby they allow up to 100 people to win smaller amounts rather than just one individual winning the full £1,000. This is good but does mean your winnings are considerably lower. If you get one out of the five numbers each week you can also win vouchers from retailers such as Graze, Beer52 and IWOOT.

The idea of this app is simple which I think plays a huge part in why it has soared up the download charts and even if you are someone who cannot stand watching adverts, take my approach and enter while doing something else.

Raffler is reportedly very buggy on Android devices but that is not to say it doesn't work and to be honest I can look past all the kinks and bugs if it meant that I won the £1,000 jackpot.

If you do sign up to Raffler be sure to use one of our referral codes, we'll leave it to you to choose who's you use. This will also give you and us an additional £100 to the jackpot.

Adam's referral code: G6J8M8

Dan's referral code: JXRCPV

Pokémon GO

Image courtesy of www.pokemongo.com

When you see people with their phones swiping up or aimlessly tapping their screen, chances are they are playing Pokémon GO. Pokémon GO has been released in the UK for the best part of five months now and is really sweeping the nation but what is it all about?

Well if you are like me and played the original Pokémon games then this app is for you.

 It certainly brings back a lot of nostalgia when playing and the best thing of all it is free to play.

For me one of the most iconic parts that made me harp back to when I was playing Pokémon on my Gameboy was choosing your starting Pokémon and like the original games you can choose from Bulbasaur, Squirtle, or Charmander.

Once you have chosen and caught your starting Pokémon your aim then is to catch all 239 Pokémon; 150 from the original universe and then since the recent update an additional 100 from the re-vamped series 2 universe.

To catch them all you must be prepared to walk hundreds and hundreds of kilometres and from what I have worked out there is no quick way of doing this - trust me on this one, I have tried a lot of different methods of speeding this up and have now given up and resorted back to playing the game as it was meant to be played.

Pokémon eggs are a good way to hatch Pokémon that you haven't seen on your wanderings around, there are three types of eggs: 2km, 5km & 10km. The 10km being the rarer Pokémon. This is where the in-app purchases can help you in speeding up the hatches as you are able to buy more incubators to hatch multiple eggs.

Normally when a game or an app has in-app purchases it ruins it and it just feels like they are there to take your money but with this I feel different, maybe because the app is free to download I do not have a problem making the occasional purchase.

Pokémon GO does come with some cons which are that is has a few software bugs meaning it can limit and make the game frustrating at times. The other downfall is that it is very intensive on the battery but I guess this isn't really anything to do with the actual mechanics of the game and is ruled out if you have a external battery pack. Overall Pokémon GO is a app that I can see myself playing for some time or at least until I've caught them all. 

So, what are you waiting for go catch em' all.

Grab new clothes with Grabble



Image courtesy of Grabble Culture

Grabble is a fun way to get new ideas about fashion and style. I downloaded Grabble roughly 6 months ago now and it's an application I use almost on a daily basis. Each day I check out their daily lists which includes clothing, accessories, home ware items and more.

The app has inspired me to look at different clothing, shoes, trainers, accessories that I wouldn't have usually gone for. It collates fashion items from lots of different retailers, from high end to your everyday high street shops. The beauty of this is that it enables you to look at clothing from shops you wouldn't necessarily visit.

Grabble is like the tinder of the fashion apps world. When you like an item on your list you swipe right and it automatically saves into your profile. When you swipe left, you are disregarding the item and it will move onto the next item. Don’t worry though, unlike Tinder you do have the chance to go back if you swiped left mistakenly.

Once your items are in your profile they will stay there until you remove them, the great part about this is that you are able to check when the items are on sale.

I am not usually someone who allows applications to notify me on my iPhone as I find it irritating, however I have made an exception to Grabble due to this feature.

At the moment I haven’t directly purchased an item through the app itself although I have bought clothing items it has highlighted to me. Grabble does allow you to purchase items through the app and they will manage the order from end to end. You are also able to track your order / delivery status.

Grabble is a free app to download and use but it is only available on iOS at the moment. They do have plans to roll out the app to Android so Android users watch this space.