Monarch Money Review: Monarch is a money management website and app that can help you budget, create a financial plan, and track your investments.
Monarch Money Review – Personal Finance App
Monarch is a Silicon Valley startup that has built a new money management platform. Its co-founders and software engineers have been developing the technology behind the scenes since 2018.
But the product didn’t publicly launch until the end of 2020. In the world of personal finance advice, a lot of attention goes towards long-term planning and investing for retirement or long-term wealth-building.
But a huge portion of real-life financial planning involves setting and reaching goals that are a few months or a few years away.
Whether you’re saving for a Supreme sweatshirt or your first house, you’ll need a plan to save enough money to reach the goal.
Monarch Money Review
The main dashboard includes your primary bank accounts, credit cards, loans, investments, and other financial accounts.
This dashboard could be reordered and customized based on your preferences. You could also invite a collaborator for no additional charge.
This feature helps partners who have mixed finances or if you’d like to give your accountant or investment advisor access to your data.
How does Monarch Money work?
Setting up an account with Monarch Money is relatively straightforward. You could open an account on its website or mobile app, which is available on the App Store and the Google Play Store.
Once you’ve logged in to your account, you can build your dashboard by syncing your external financial accounts and organizing their widgets.
Monarch Money works with more than 12,000 financial institutions and investment firms. The app uses data transfer services Plaid and Finicity to connect to those financial institutions securely.
However, some institutions, like Capital One, Wells Fargo, or American Express, may have trouble connecting.
Monarch Money Cost
Once you’re connected, Monarch Money will sync your transactions and allocate them to their respective categories, such as rent/mortgage, credit card, or groceries.
You could also create and customize your categorization. If one of your accounts cannot sync through the app, you could manually add expenses and transactions to get a full picture of your net worth and budget.
Monarch Money Investment Tracking Features
The investment section helps you view your entire portfolio, including 401(k) plans and taxable brokerage accounts.
You can view your investment performance over time and chart changes based on specific time frames.
You can track investments through mobile and web platforms. These platforms allow you to view how your investments are allocated based on the asset class.
You could also analyze your historical performance and compare your portfolio against critical industry benchmarks across different time ranges.
What Does It Offer
Users connect financial accounts (called Synced Accounts) to the app.
The app then works to automatically categorize transactions into specific categories. Users can update the categorization, and customize categories.
If you’ve got assets outside of Synced Accounts, you can enter those manually into the app. That makes it easier to track your real net worth in the app.
Once you’ve connected your accounts, Monarch will suggest a budget and calculate your net worth. You can also enter as many goals as you want financial goals section.
1. Sync All Your Financial Accounts
There are currently over 11,200 bank, brokerage, and other financial accounts that can be synced with Monarch Money.
Unlike some of its competitors, Monarch uses more than one data aggregator to increase its sync coverage.
For example, you can link your real estate values via Zillow Zestimate to get a picture of your real estate net worth.
The drawback is there is limited support for crypto. Right now, only Coinbase is supported, but there are plans to allow you to connect to other exchanges and wallets in the future.
2. Monitor Your Transactions And Cashflow
If you’re looking for a solid spending tracker to see how you’re spending your money and where your cash is going, Monarch offers a great solution.
You can track your transactions, categorize them, create custom categories, and even set up tags for other members of your household.
This is a solid tool to allow you to track your spending and create a budget.
3. Create and Track Your Goals
Monarch’s focus on goals-based planning is its primary point of differentiation. Users who need help breaking up large goals into smaller pieces will be pleased.
The app also allows users to “direct free cash” to specific financial goals. When you put money towards a goal, the app rewards you.
The little confetti reward on the screen is surprisingly fun. It makes financial progress into a small celebration.
4. Customizable Dashboards
After logging into your account, you’ll notice a “Customize dashboard” option at the top of your Dashboard page.
After tapping that button, you can drag and drop the widgets to change their order or remove elements completely.
5. Investment Tracking
In our initial review of Monarch Money, the lack of investment tracking tools was one of its major downfalls. However, Monarch listened to its users and recently launched its new investment feature.
Now, you can use the app to analyze your entire portfolio across multiple brokers and accounts.
The investment tracking is still not as robust as some of the competitors. You can see your holdings and a benchmark to the index (very similar to Personal Capital), and you can see the “type” of investment.
However, there is no investment allocation tracking yet, and it’s difficult to track income from the investments (for example, there’s no native “Dividend” category).
Things Monarch Money Doesn’t Have
1. One thing Monarch Money does not offer is credit score monitoring, and their cryptocurrency feature only syncs with the Coinbase exchange.
2. It is kept separate from the rest of your investment accounts, and crypto prices are tracked in real-time and are updated 24/7. But if you use a different crypto exchange, you may not be able to access this feature.
3. On the positive side, Monarch Money does not contain ads, and it doesn’t try to sell you financial products like credit cards or loans.
4. The app also claims it doesn’t sell customers’ financial data to third parties.
If you’ve ever been annoyed by ads or worried about who had access to your data with other apps, Monarch Money may be worth the monthly or yearly subscription cost.
The Benefit of Monarch Money
1. As you learn how to manage your money, having an app that offers multiple features on one platform might be helpful.
2. Not only is Monarch Money good at tracking your cash and spending habits, but some of its features might be beneficial for those who like to break larger goals into smaller pieces.
3. Using a banking app, you could set up a monthly contribution into your savings account. For example, you might move $500 as a lump sum into your savings account every month.
4. But Monarch Money could help you break that sum up into different parts for an emergency fund, travel, or a down payment on a house. It does this without requiring additional bank accounts.
How to get started with Monarch Money
1. Monarch Money is available on iOS and Android and has a web version.
2. You could create a Monarch Money account and sign up for the free 7-day trial through either the app or web version, and you don’t need a credit card to access the free trial.
3. When your trial ends, you can choose one of the available subscription plans. You can pay for one month at a time, for $9.99 per month; or pay $89.99 once annually, which equates to about $7.50 a month.
How to Contact Monarch
You won’t find a customer service phone number listed anywhere on Monarch’s website.
However, the company does offer live chat customer support that you can access once you’ve logged into your account. You can also email Monarch at support@monarchmoney.com
Is It Safe and Secure?
Any platform that wants to access all of your financial accounts needs to place a strong emphasis on security and privacy.
Thankfully, Monarch uses Plaid as its primary data aggregator which is the trusted industry leader and maintains strict security standards. Plus, it also has other connections as well.
Additionally, Monarch says that it never sells any of its users’ private information to third parties. It also offers multi-factor authentication for account logins.
Monarch Money vs. Mint
Monarch tracks all of your investment holdings in all of your accounts, so you can analyze your entire portfolio’s performance and allocation.
Mint tracks your account balances and captures some holding information. Monarch uses multiple data providers to optimize our institution sync coverage.
Mint
Mint is a simple budget tracker and planner tool that lets users bring all their accounts, bills, and financial data in a single place to conveniently manage their finances.
It is a free and easy-to-use platform that connects every US financial institution. The tool takes care of users’ bank accounts, credit cards, and even retirement accounts.
It enables the users to view all their bills and money at a glance and create budgets easily by using the tips that it provides.
Mint allows users to easily track their bills, they just need to add them to their dashboard to see and monitor them.
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1. Ad-Supported
The interface is filled with distracting ads. “Special partner” offers cannot be disabled.
2. Single User
If you want to share your data with a partner, you must share your login and password.
3. Limited Investment Tracking
Mint tracks your account balances and captures some holding information.
4. In-House Syncing
Mint has built its syncing infrastructure instead of integrating with the leading data providers.
5. Focused On The Past
Mint’s reports focus on what has happened in the past after you’ve already spent the money.
6. No Support
Mint does not offer any kind of customer support from real humans.
7. No Roadmap Visibility
Mint does not have a public roadmap available. Users do not know what Mint is working on next.
8. Outdated Design
Mint’s web interface has remained the same for many years while mobile has changed more frequently, making the two apps feel disconnected.
Monarch Money
Monarch Money is a platform used to track accounts and analyze your investments to achieve your goals.
The software offers tools for an up-to-date view of your assets, liabilities, and spending. Collaborate with teams to identify trends and set up budgets to monitor your track with goals.
It supports Mobile Android and iOS. Individuals, Small companies make use of the software.
1. No Advertisements
Monarch makes money through a low-cost subscription. This means we get to focus solely on improving the product for you, and you never see an ad.
2. Built-in Collaboration
Invite a partner to your household for a joint view of your finances. You will each get your login and a joint understanding of your finances. You can even invite a financial advisor.
3. Powerful Investment Tools
Monarch tracks all of your investment holdings in all of your accounts, so you can analyze your entire portfolio’s performance and allocation.
4. Improved Data Syncing
Monarch uses multiple data providers to optimize our institution sync coverage.
This means more institutions are supported, syncs happen faster, and you get clean data for your balances, transactions, and investments.
5. Plan for Your Financial Future
Monarch helps you generate a financial plan that stretches years into the future. This helps you effectively plan for your larger financial goals.
6. Responsive Customer Support
Our customer support team will jump in and help you with any questions, comments, or issues you may think of. We’re always here to help!
7. Contribute To the Product Roadmap
We let our users vote on the features they want us to build next. We use this information to define our product roadmap to ensure we’re always building the best product for our customers.
8. Modern, Intuitive Design
Monarch has a beautiful, intuitive, and clean design across web and mobile. We obsess over the details to make sure every piece of the product is easy to use.
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