Savings rules

Would it be possible to set a very simple rule that has been extremely effective in Monzo to help with savings?

It’s is simply whenever a payment is made a set amount is transferred to savings. You select the amount, a pound or two seems to accumulate well.

Do you mean the “round ups”? This is very effective and allows you to ‘round up’ any transaction to the next nearest pound .

You can find this in your ‘Save’ and ‘Your savings rules’

You can also play with IFTTT rules that add funds based on things you do. There’s a separate topic about those:

Hi Rob

No not round ups. That’s great for small change but not what I meant.

Everytime you spend on the card you place a set amount into savings. e.g. everytime I use my card £1 is transferred to savings. Or £2, or £3, whatever the user specifies.

Using Monzo as an example, you can create an IFTTT trigger that does this. I may be missing something but I don’t think that’s possible with dozens currently?

I see. As far as I know, the dozens service in IFTTT is only an Action, not a Trigger

in other words you can’t use it to start an applet, only get dozens to do something when something else triggers it

I could look into that being added, but I don’t know if there is a reason this has not yet been added.

What we are working on are related triggers that would do something like:

  1. create a budget
  2. track your spending
  3. move any net underspend each week / month into your savings

This could have the same effect if you had an appropriate budget and you wanted to move reasonable amounts into your savings.

However, let me look into it :slight_smile:

Thanks Robert

Having it as an action and also a trigger is extremely useful in getting people to save money on a regular basis. Thanks for having a look

Hi Rob

A spending rule that moves any net underspend each month to savings would be great. I’ve been applying this rule manually to my accounts for a few years now and find it really helps.

In general, having more customisable savings rules would be very helpful. I don’t like the IFTTT ones for example - they seem both quite random and to me I feel some of them come with privacy concerns. Ultimately it would be good if dozens could allow the user to establish savings rules that are incentive compatible with wider personal / financial / health goals. For example, I’m sure a lot of people will say they currently spend too much on coffee. So why not introduce a spending rule that means that if people spend less each each on coffee than they had budgeted for then the net underspend gets transferred direct to your savings? There must be plenty of examples like this but since incentive compatibility between bank and customer is a key dozens selling point, the logical next step seems to be to create compatible incentives between a consumer’s finances and their wider behaviour. (And yes, for my day job I’m an economist!)

Hi Team,

I’ve set up a couple of IFTTT rules for savings…

Linked with my Strava account to put £1.00 away after each run to save for new trainers! It worked, would be nice to save an amount based on distance, maybe I can do that if I dig deeper into IFTTT

Destination Saving as in Dozens app… seems over sensitive on the geo-fence as I was punished for visiting the biscuit isle at Lidl when I drove straight to work like a good boss!

Google home hub rule - I ask her to “save a quid” and a couple of seconds later she says “I just saved a quid” and my phone pings.

How long does rounding-up take to action?

All good fun :slight_smile:

Excellent ideas … Just careful of you have a conversation at home about “having saved a few quid” as who know what might happen.

Currently round ups Hakeem with the overnight transaction settlement but this should change soon and be linked with the authorisation (which is what appears in your spend list).

Now feeling the challenge to come up with more clever rules

OK, fairly new to actually using IFTT although have been aware of it for a while. Have set up a couple of rules but as each are for the same amount and are merely labeled as ‘IFTT savings rule’ in spend, it is not clear which rule was triggered. It would be nice if spend quoted the rule, not just IFTT. May not be possible however if you don’t ask … Many thanks. Jeremy

1 Like

I’m sure we’d love to do that some time in future if we can. I’ll make sure it is on the future roadmap.

In the interim, if you want to know more about your rules usage, then you can install the IFTTT app as this will detail the times your rules are triggered so you know what each was for.