Monarch Money Review: Features and Honest Opinion
Monarch Money is a budgeting app that offers a range of features to help you manage your finances effectively. In this review, we'll delve into the customizable dashboard, free trial, account linking, tracking features, and more to provide an honest opinion on the app's usability and effectiveness.
Customizable Dashboard
The dashboard is fully customizable, allowing you to tailor it to your specific needs. You can turn off features, drag and rearrange items, and make it look however you want. This flexibility ensures that you only see the information that's relevant to you.
Free Trial
Monarch Money offers a 7-day free trial, but with a special link, you can get a 30-day free trial. This extended trial period gives you more time to get familiar with the app and its features.
Account Linking
You can link various accounts to Monarch Money, including bank accounts, credit cards, investments, property (with address and tracking through Zillow), and vehicles (with VIN number). This allows you to track your financial information from a single platform.
Tracking Features
Monarch Money offers several tracking features, including net worth tracking, budgeting, and automatic tracking of account values through Zillow and VIN numbers. These features provide a comprehensive view of your financial situation and help you make informed decisions.
Updates and Linking Issues
The app has made significant updates to address linking issues with various accounts. It has successfully linked with popular accounts, including those recently added. If you encounter any linking issues, you can try using Plaid, Fidelity, or MX to connect your accounts.
Preset Groups and Categories
Monarch Money comes with 60 preset categories within groups, which can be customized, edited, renamed, rearranged, or deactivated (grayed out). This flexibility allows you to create a categorization system that works best for you.
Deleting Categories
Although you cannot officially delete a category, you can disable it. If you disable a category with transactions, you'll be asked where to move those transactions to. The best way to do this is to go into settings and organize your budget.
Customizing Categories
You can customize categories to fit your needs, and there's no right or wrong way to do it. The app doesn't offer a startup guide, but the help section has tutorials and videos to help you get started.
Setting Up Your Budget
When setting up your budget, you'll see the past three months of spending for each category. You can choose to select the average of the last three months or type in a specific amount for each category. It's essential to have all transactions correctly categorized for this to work. We recommend setting up your budget, organizing it, and then going through all transactions first.
Categorization
The categorization feature is not 100% accurate, but it's pretty good compared to other budgeting apps. You can change the categorization if needed by clicking on the transaction and selecting a new category. You can also create rules for frequently purchased items to automatically categorize future transactions.
Forecast
The budget category has a forecast feature that helps with syncing funds and planning for irregular income. This feature is particularly useful for saving up for specific goals, like a vacation.
Transaction Importing
Transactions from linked accounts will automatically import and categorize. The amount of transactions imported will vary depending on the account.
Categorizing Transactions
The system does a good job of categorizing transactions, but you can change them if needed. You can create rules for frequently purchased items and apply the new category to existing transactions. Rules can be customized by merchant, exact amount, and more.
Rolling Over Budget Amounts
The system allows you to roll over budget amounts from one month to the next. This feature is useful for sinking funds, such as saving up for a vacation, or for budgeting for regular expenses like groceries. You can choose to turn on or off the rolling over of budget amounts.
Reports
The system offers various reports that are currently in beta mode. These reports provide insights and summaries of your financial data, including budgeting and spending habits. More features and reports may be added in the future as the system continues to develop.
Other Features
Monarch Money offers several other features, including:
- Visual reports on income, which are especially helpful for those with inconsistent income.
- One household subscription with two member logins, ideal for couples or partners to view the same budget, but with separate logins.
- Ability to invite a financial advisor for 60 days, with the option to delete their access at any time.
- "Needs Review" feature to tag expenses for others to categorize, for example, for a spouse or partner to review and categorize.
- Good customer service with a comprehensive help section, chatbot, and ticket submission for quick responses.
Honest Opinion
Monarch Money offers many features, but this means it takes a bit more time to get started and requires some elbow grease. It's not suitable for everyone, especially those looking for a simpler or cheaper budgeting app. However, it's ideal for couples or partners who want to link accounts and view the same budget, those with inconsistent income who want to use the forecasting tool to predict income, and those who want detailed reports to track past income.
Recommendation
For those willing to put in the time and effort to get detail-oriented with their budgeting, Monarch Money is a great option. With its free 30-day trial, you can test the app and see if it's the right fit for you.