Thank you for all your help. Just started using Monarch coming from Mint. I love their interface so much better. Looking forward to using it and following your tips and tricks!
Loving your content! Would be great to see how you handle business transactions - I have a couple of different side hustles (separate LLCs) so would like to know best practices for how to handle this in monarch
I'm getting Monarch set up and have found your videos super helpful. Thank you! I'm still struggling to understand how to categorize monthly IRA contributions to "remove" that money from allocatable funds to budget. They feel like an expense to me since they are no longer. I'm picking up they should be set up as a goal. Do you cover that in one of your videos?
Hey there! So you would put monthly IRA contributions as a "transfer" and then you can attach that contribution to a Goal in Monarch Money IF your IRA is feeding transactions. Most don't. You can create a transfer category for IRA contributions by going to edit your categories in the settings. You don't want to categorize this as an expense category or else you won't get rewarded with the savings rate that Monarch would provide you.
Thanks Taylor! I really liked your fixed vs variable category distinctions. I glossed over that before but it's a great idea! Have you seen this puzzling thing with my mortgage payment with respect to my cash flow? It is spent when it leaves my checking account but added back when it lands in my mortgage. So my spending is understated in my cash flow. Contributions to investments like vanguard don't behave this way.
Hey there! All you need to do is mark the receving payment as a "Transfer" for the category. This happens with Mortgages and other loans. There is the outgoing payment when funds leave your checking account which should be categorized as the expense and the receiving payment (green) should be labelled as a transfer so that it won't affect cash flow.
What's the best way to handle large expenses? For example: we have a remodel coming up. We've saved the cash for that in a separate account (not linked to Monarch) so it's not really being spent from current income. I want to track the remodel expenses so I know how much we have spent but I don't want it to impact my monthly budget or the cash flow report. I had set up a category for remodel expenses and excluded it from the budget - but these expenses are still showing up in my cash flow report. So my monthly reconciliation of the budget doesn't match the cash flow report. Is there a way to handle this so my monthly budget and cash flow report don't show these transactions - but I can still look somewhere to see how much we've spent towards the remodel?
I am just learning about Monarch, so thank you for the videos. I have found that when my 401K gets rebalanced internally the amount that was moved around within the 401k shows up as a large expense which really throws off the budget comparisons or my trues spend. Is there a way to resolve that? Thanks,
If I get rid of all the red bubbles, then how can I tell that I was “over budget” in certain categories? For example, I plan to spend $1000 on groceries and actually spend $1450. After removing red bubbles, it looks like I planned $1450 initially, but i actually overspent. Does that make sense?
Yeah, there isn't a way to have a stagnant budget. You would just want to run reports for groceries for the year and see which months went over your goal or under.
@evolvingmoney 10:11 I currently have retirement accounts linked to monarch and mark those as “transfers” in monarch- so that it doesn’t show up as an expense If I shifted to your recommendation ; is there anyway that I can mark those transactions as part of the goal ? ( when I click on the expense it won’t allow me to select goals, only the standard categories )
No, the only transactions that can be attached to goals are transactions that come from the account connected to the goal. So if your retirement account is feeding transactions to Monarch, then you can attach the deposited amount to the goal.
What if you had to make a purchase that was not anticipated and not saved up for in a sinking fund? I’m impulsively planning an international trip, I plan to put that on my 0% 12-month intro APR card, I plan to set a rollover of $500/mo for 3 months to cover the plane ticket, and by then the ticket would be paid off by virtue of not spending that amount every month. But, that would mean a red bubble, and you say not to have red bubbles when you have rollover categories. I have several rollover categories that I could turn off. What could I do?
As long as the red bubble make sense to you, you can keep it there. So if you are okay with seeing the big negative for the purchase and okay with putting $500 a month toward that to bring down that red bubble, then great! You can also attach the charges on the credit card to the goal of paying down that credit card over time instead. When you attach a transaction to a goal, the charges won't show up in your budget.
@@evolvingmoney What if I were to hide the $1500 purchase, but categorize the $500/mo credit card payments as an expense? I assume the Budget and Cash Flow tabs and the Net Worth graph would look fine. I'm using this credit card for my other expenses as well, so I would pay off the statement balance - $500, and make a separate $500 payment that I'd categorize as an expense.
I have a scenario that I keep running into regarding a rollover budget. I have set up for property taxes. At the end of June I have about $13,000 in that property taxes budget. I also in June had a random unexpected one time expense that I normally would not budget for. Based off of your video you would recommend I cover that one time non-budgeted expense with money from my property taxes budget since there’s $13,000 in it and I don’t technically need to use it yet. Prior to this app I would just leave the one time expense alone and basically know in my head that that is being paid for by money that’s already in my savings account. But essentially if I were to cover that one time expense by using some of the property taxes budget it’s pretty much the same as just taking money from my right pocket and putting it in my left pocket a.k.a. taking money straight from my savings account to cover the one time expense or taking it from the property taxes budget, which is already also in my savings account. Does this make sense?
yes, you are still technically taking from the savings account that is for property taxes, so why not reflect that in the app as a reduction in property taxes.
Brand new to both Monarch and your channel as of tonight. Curious, where you were showing the tedious side of clearing out all the red bubbles by allocating unbudgeted funds to each category that needed it... Could you just put all the unallocated funds to one category and then click on the red bubble for each overbudget item and select to pull from the category you overbudgeted on?
Hi! This is so helpful but I have a question on rollover categories. I have a category for my husband and I which is our "personal spending money". If I put $50 into the account each month but have a one time transaction that is more than my current balance the account will show negative. I would normally then just keep adding $50 per month moving forward to "refund" that account vs moving money from a sinking fund/savings to make it whole. Will that cause a problem in my cash flow reports? This is my first time using a budgeting app vs a spreadsheet with multiple tabs for each category and that balances with my checking account balance. I'm working on changing my mindset!
Negative rollovers can be left alone since next month is supposed to replenish it. The only ones you really need to avoid are positive/green Rollovers IF any negative red bubbles exist. You can trust your positive rollovers as long as there are no red bubbles and allow them to roll over month to month.
What about if you actually go over in any given month? So even after applying all the savings you're still over. How do you handle that the next month?
You'll have to let it roll over into the next month and try to spend less month. If you were comfortable using savings for it that were available before setting up your Monarch, then you could also reset the red bubble so that it doesn't carry forward to next month
@@evolvingmoney Does this mean that any category that has the potential to vary month to month should be a rollover? Assuming there are no savings to pull from.
If the budget shows $0 left over, and at month end, actual income minus expenses were $1,000, how would you put that $1,000 back into a savings goal? I can't record that as an actual savings for that goal, and if I put it in the budgeted amount for that goal, my budget is no longer $0, and also, I'm changing what I budgeted originally. Do you change the original budget at the end of the month to match what the actual income and expenses were? Do you have a video that addresses the different ways to show the additions and subtractions to and from a savings goal?
Hey there! Yes, in this video, I walk through how you need to match your budget numbers to actual numbers. If you do this, you should see that $1k left to budget and you can assign it to rollover categories or savings!
@@evolvingmoney I was confused by your answer but now I think what you are saying is that at the end of the month, the budgeted income needs to be matched to actual income. The excess can be allocated to rollover categories or savings. I had interpreted your answer as saying that the budgeted expenses need to be adjusted to actual expenses. This would make the rollover amounts $0 for all expenses. However, if I underspent $50 on groceries for example, then I'd like to see that $50 in my grocery budget for the next month. If I overspent $50 on groceries, above and beyond the rollover amount, I need to move money from other categories to fund that overspending. I wouldn't think that instead, I would increase the budgeted amount for groceries for that month, and then decrease another budgeted expense in order to balance the budget. Is that what you are recommending?
How do you roll over money for the entire month? I want to keep a certain amount in the account for expenses that occur on the first few days of the month before any deposits have occurred. How is this done?
You can only rollover funds in specific categories. Monarch's budget is not designed to reflect what is actually in your bank account, just showing you inflows and outflows and planned savings. It's an app that doesn't really take into consideration timing of bills, due dates, and availability in the accounts.
@@evolvingmoney thank you! This has been confusing me a bit since I'm used to see the amount actually in my account. I'm also starting my first time with a brand new month (I started using in mid June) and it's confusing to see that I'm already in the red but it's just because payday is this coming Friday! :-) I would not be surviving the trial of this app without your videos!
Hey, got a bit confused. I’m new to Monarch(from Mint) so I’m wondering how rollover will work. You said rollovers HAVE to be green but also said electric bill I’m just gonna let it rollover for lesser months to cover?
I have the same question, is it only rollover categories that need to be green or all of them? And what if you can't make it green? Thank you @@evolvingmoney
10 месяцев назад
Hi! Just signed up for MM. I found your videos to be very helpful. Thank you. Question, how would you handle flex pay. Would you keep it out of monarch like Venmo? My money going into flex is pretax each paycheck. Mostly we use a flex pay credit card so if I do nothing, i suppose that would work? Any recommendations?
I am actually not sure exactly the mechanics to give advice on this. I might have to see an example on this one.
10 месяцев назад
@@evolvingmoney Two examples 1) money comes out of paycheck to a pretax flex account. When I pay a dr, I used a debit/credit card that takes funds directly out of the flex account being funded which avoids the state and federal income tax. Example 2: Occasionally, we might use the debit or credit card (for a dr or medical expense ) already linked to Monarch Money. We than can submit the expense to the flex account and the flex account will reimburse me directly into that checking account. Make sense ?
Another fantastic video, Taylor. I'm falling in love...lol. My Goals are now set up for our 2024 Roth IRAs ($8,000 x 2). Setting aside $666 x 2 per month. To get the goal's status bar to show progression, I ended up going into the goal's Actions > Edit Account and pulling from what's available to $666. Next month I'll change that to $1332 and so on. Is that okay to do? Will it mess with any of the reports? I won't have to do that when MM adds transactions to investment accounts. Thx
Hey! I would be happy to chat. You are welcome to send me an email with the times you are looking for and I can let you know if any availability can be made. You can find my email at my website www.evolvingmoneycoaching.com
Assign it to a category. You could create a "general" savings category, to assign unused funds, but I recommend just allocating funds to upcoming expenses like extra loan payments, travel, or home improvement, etc
You content has helped me so much! Thank you!
Thank you for all your help. Just started using Monarch coming from Mint. I love their interface so much better. Looking forward to using it and following your tips and tricks!
Great to hear!
This was so helpful! Thank you so much for the great explanation!
Glad you think so!
Thanks. And I can't tell you how many times I have blown up a carefully crafted annual "forecast" because of the All future months checkbox default.
Right?! It is a WILDLY frustrating feature!
Loving your content! Would be great to see how you handle business transactions - I have a couple of different side hustles (separate LLCs) so would like to know best practices for how to handle this in monarch
Deal! I can do that. Lot's of my clients are monitoring income for side-hustles in Monarch.
I'm getting Monarch set up and have found your videos super helpful. Thank you! I'm still struggling to understand how to categorize monthly IRA contributions to "remove" that money from allocatable funds to budget. They feel like an expense to me since they are no longer. I'm picking up they should be set up as a goal. Do you cover that in one of your videos?
Hey there! So you would put monthly IRA contributions as a "transfer" and then you can attach that contribution to a Goal in Monarch Money IF your IRA is feeding transactions. Most don't. You can create a transfer category for IRA contributions by going to edit your categories in the settings.
You don't want to categorize this as an expense category or else you won't get rewarded with the savings rate that Monarch would provide you.
I'll do a video on this step by step very shortly!
Thanks Taylor! I really liked your fixed vs variable category distinctions. I glossed over that before but it's a great idea!
Have you seen this puzzling thing with my mortgage payment with respect to my cash flow? It is spent when it leaves my checking account but added back when it lands in my mortgage. So my spending is understated in my cash flow. Contributions to investments like vanguard don't behave this way.
Hey there! All you need to do is mark the receving payment as a "Transfer" for the category. This happens with Mortgages and other loans. There is the outgoing payment when funds leave your checking account which should be categorized as the expense and the receiving payment (green) should be labelled as a transfer so that it won't affect cash flow.
@@evolvingmoney that's a great way! Thank you.
What's the best way to handle large expenses? For example: we have a remodel coming up. We've saved the cash for that in a separate account (not linked to Monarch) so it's not really being spent from current income. I want to track the remodel expenses so I know how much we have spent but I don't want it to impact my monthly budget or the cash flow report. I had set up a category for remodel expenses and excluded it from the budget - but these expenses are still showing up in my cash flow report. So my monthly reconciliation of the budget doesn't match the cash flow report. Is there a way to handle this so my monthly budget and cash flow report don't show these transactions - but I can still look somewhere to see how much we've spent towards the remodel?
I think this video I did on reports might help! Let me know if not. ruclips.net/video/oJHViAJnkNM/видео.htmlsi=Qs3ZDcHucP6xq02R
I am just learning about Monarch, so thank you for the videos. I have found that when my 401K gets rebalanced internally the amount that was moved around within the 401k shows up as a large expense which really throws off the budget comparisons or my trues spend. Is there a way to resolve that? Thanks,
Mark as a transfers! Or create categories in the transfer section so it does not show up in your budget or cash flow reports
If I get rid of all the red bubbles, then how can I tell that I was “over budget” in certain categories? For example, I plan to spend $1000 on groceries and actually spend $1450. After removing red bubbles, it looks like I planned $1450 initially, but i actually overspent. Does that make sense?
Yeah, there isn't a way to have a stagnant budget. You would just want to run reports for groceries for the year and see which months went over your goal or under.
@@evolvingmoney ah okay, good idea. Thanks!
@evolvingmoney
10:11 I currently have retirement accounts linked to monarch and mark those as “transfers” in monarch- so that it doesn’t show up as an expense
If I shifted to your recommendation ; is there anyway that I can mark those transactions as part of the goal ? ( when I click on the expense it won’t allow me to select goals, only the standard categories )
No, the only transactions that can be attached to goals are transactions that come from the account connected to the goal. So if your retirement account is feeding transactions to Monarch, then you can attach the deposited amount to the goal.
What if you had to make a purchase that was not anticipated and not saved up for in a sinking fund? I’m impulsively planning an international trip, I plan to put that on my 0% 12-month intro APR card, I plan to set a rollover of $500/mo for 3 months to cover the plane ticket, and by then the ticket would be paid off by virtue of not spending that amount every month. But, that would mean a red bubble, and you say not to have red bubbles when you have rollover categories. I have several rollover categories that I could turn off. What could I do?
As long as the red bubble make sense to you, you can keep it there. So if you are okay with seeing the big negative for the purchase and okay with putting $500 a month toward that to bring down that red bubble, then great! You can also attach the charges on the credit card to the goal of paying down that credit card over time instead. When you attach a transaction to a goal, the charges won't show up in your budget.
@@evolvingmoney What if I were to hide the $1500 purchase, but categorize the $500/mo credit card payments as an expense? I assume the Budget and Cash Flow tabs and the Net Worth graph would look fine. I'm using this credit card for my other expenses as well, so I would pay off the statement balance - $500, and make a separate $500 payment that I'd categorize as an expense.
Love your content!!
Thank you! That means a lot!
I have a scenario that I keep running into regarding a rollover budget. I have set up for property taxes. At the end of June I have about $13,000 in that property taxes budget. I also in June had a random unexpected one time expense that I normally would not budget for. Based off of your video you would recommend I cover that one time non-budgeted expense with money from my property taxes budget since there’s $13,000 in it and I don’t technically need to use it yet. Prior to this app I would just leave the one time expense alone and basically know in my head that that is being paid for by money that’s already in my savings account. But essentially if I were to cover that one time expense by using some of the property taxes budget it’s pretty much the same as just taking money from my right pocket and putting it in my left pocket a.k.a. taking money straight from my savings account to cover the one time expense or taking it from the property taxes budget, which is already also in my savings account. Does this make sense?
yes, you are still technically taking from the savings account that is for property taxes, so why not reflect that in the app as a reduction in property taxes.
Brand new to both Monarch and your channel as of tonight. Curious, where you were showing the tedious side of clearing out all the red bubbles by allocating unbudgeted funds to each category that needed it... Could you just put all the unallocated funds to one category and then click on the red bubble for each overbudget item and select to pull from the category you overbudgeted on?
Yes, you should be able to do that just fine!
Hi! This is so helpful but I have a question on rollover categories. I have a category for my husband and I which is our "personal spending money". If I put $50 into the account each month but have a one time transaction that is more than my current balance the account will show negative. I would normally then just keep adding $50 per month moving forward to "refund" that account vs moving money from a sinking fund/savings to make it whole. Will that cause a problem in my cash flow reports? This is my first time using a budgeting app vs a spreadsheet with multiple tabs for each category and that balances with my checking account balance. I'm working on changing my mindset!
Negative rollovers can be left alone since next month is supposed to replenish it. The only ones you really need to avoid are positive/green Rollovers IF any negative red bubbles exist. You can trust your positive rollovers as long as there are no red bubbles and allow them to roll over month to month.
What about if you actually go over in any given month? So even after applying all the savings you're still over. How do you handle that the next month?
You'll have to let it roll over into the next month and try to spend less month. If you were comfortable using savings for it that were available before setting up your Monarch, then you could also reset the red bubble so that it doesn't carry forward to next month
@@evolvingmoney Does this mean that any category that has the potential to vary month to month should be a rollover? Assuming there are no savings to pull from.
If the budget shows $0 left over, and at month end, actual income minus expenses were $1,000, how would you put that $1,000 back into a savings goal? I can't record that as an actual savings for that goal, and if I put it in the budgeted amount for that goal, my budget is no longer $0, and also, I'm changing what I budgeted originally. Do you change the original budget at the end of the month to match what the actual income and expenses were? Do you have a video that addresses the different ways to show the additions and subtractions to and from a savings goal?
Hey there! Yes, in this video, I walk through how you need to match your budget numbers to actual numbers. If you do this, you should see that $1k left to budget and you can assign it to rollover categories or savings!
@@evolvingmoney I was confused by your answer but now I think what you are saying is that at the end of the month, the budgeted income needs to be matched to actual income. The excess can be allocated to rollover categories or savings. I had interpreted your answer as saying that the budgeted expenses need to be adjusted to actual expenses. This would make the rollover amounts $0 for all expenses. However, if I underspent $50 on groceries for example, then I'd like to see that $50 in my grocery budget for the next month. If I overspent $50 on groceries, above and beyond the rollover amount, I need to move money from other categories to fund that overspending. I wouldn't think that instead, I would increase the budgeted amount for groceries for that month, and then decrease another budgeted expense in order to balance the budget. Is that what you are recommending?
How do you roll over money for the entire month? I want to keep a certain amount in the account for expenses that occur on the first few days of the month before any deposits have occurred. How is this done?
You can only rollover funds in specific categories. Monarch's budget is not designed to reflect what is actually in your bank account, just showing you inflows and outflows and planned savings. It's an app that doesn't really take into consideration timing of bills, due dates, and availability in the accounts.
@@evolvingmoney thank you! This has been confusing me a bit since I'm used to see the amount actually in my account. I'm also starting my first time with a brand new month (I started using in mid June) and it's confusing to see that I'm already in the red but it's just because payday is this coming Friday! :-) I would not be surviving the trial of this app without your videos!
Hey, got a bit confused. I’m new to Monarch(from Mint) so I’m wondering how rollover will work. You said rollovers HAVE to be green but also said electric bill I’m just gonna let it rollover for lesser months to cover?
I am doing a video on that this week to help with this question!
I have the same question, is it only rollover categories that need to be green or all of them? And what if you can't make it green? Thank you @@evolvingmoney
Hi! Just signed up for MM. I found your videos to be very helpful. Thank you. Question, how would you handle flex pay. Would you keep it out of monarch like Venmo? My money going into flex is pretax each paycheck. Mostly we use a flex pay credit card so if I do nothing, i suppose that would work? Any recommendations?
I am actually not sure exactly the mechanics to give advice on this. I might have to see an example on this one.
@@evolvingmoney Two examples
1) money comes out of paycheck to a pretax flex account. When I pay a dr, I used a debit/credit card that takes funds directly out of the flex account being funded which avoids the state and federal income tax.
Example 2: Occasionally, we might use the debit or credit card (for a dr or medical expense ) already linked to Monarch Money. We than can submit the expense to the flex account and the flex account will reimburse me directly into that checking account.
Make sense ?
How do i add savings to this app?
Are you wondering about how to add a savings account or show savings? Showing savings would be using the goal feature, which I do have a video on!
Another fantastic video, Taylor. I'm falling in love...lol. My Goals are now set up for our 2024 Roth IRAs ($8,000 x 2). Setting aside $666 x 2 per month. To get the goal's status bar to show progression, I ended up going into the goal's Actions > Edit Account and pulling from what's available to $666. Next month I'll change that to $1332 and so on. Is that okay to do? Will it mess with any of the reports? I won't have to do that when MM adds transactions to investment accounts. Thx
I am glad you are finding so much value in the videos! I do believe that will work just fine and shouldn't mess with your reports.
I would like to chat with you; however, your times do not work for me. Please reply if we can work a time out to chat. Thanks
Hey! I would be happy to chat. You are welcome to send me an email with the times you are looking for and I can let you know if any availability can be made. You can find my email at my website www.evolvingmoneycoaching.com
How do you deal with unspent money that you need to rollover into the next month? What’s the best way to do that in Monarch?
Assign it to a category. You could create a "general" savings category, to assign unused funds, but I recommend just allocating funds to upcoming expenses like extra loan payments, travel, or home improvement, etc
I wish the "Apply to all future months" checkbox was unchecked by default.