r/MonarchMoney

I may be late to the party but I spent a few hours this weekend using the Claude extension for Chrome, and it fixed two issues I've had with Monarch for a long time and It's completely changed my outlook on how I'll use Monarch going forward.

1. Mortgage payment splits

I've always wanted my mortgage activity to be more granular, but I kept putting it off because I assumed cleaning up life-to-date history would be tedious and time-consuming. I downloaded my full payment history from my administrator, already broken out by principal, interest, escrow, insurance, etc., and gave it to Claude. It went through every payment back to 2022 and recategorized all of it in Monarch.

2. Gross-to-net paycheck splits

Similar to the mortgage, I felt a lot of important information was missing because Monarch only saw the net cash hitting my bank account. I downloaded my pay stubs for the year, and Claude built a spreadsheet itemizing every line on each stub (dates as rows, items as columns). It then found each paycheck deposit in Monarch and split it into its component parts. Taxes, 401(k), medical, HSA, transit, and insurance now all land in real categories, and my cash flow and reports show a much more accurate picture of what's coming in and going out. None of that was visible before. I had it verify that every split matched the deposit before saving, and my year-to-date income in Monarch now ties exactly to my final pay stub.

 

Monarch is a powerful tool, but getting the most out of it has always felt like it required a lot of tedious, manual work. With Claude and similar tools, I not only cut down the time it took to make these improvements, I was able to do it with much more confidence. At a few points I asked Claude things like "Do you agree with this approach?" or "Can you find examples online of how others handle this?", and the advice it came back with was actually good. A couple times it called me out for making a mistake.

I've seen some posts here lately that are pretty critical of Monarch, and I'm not disagreeing with them. My point is that Claude and other AI tools can help bridge some of those gaps. The mortgage side is a great example: my servicer's connection is notoriously unreliable, (I went four months with no transactions syncing at all, I think I reconnected it 25+ times). Knowing I can just download the activity and have Claude enter it for me makes a big difference to my experience.

 

Curious to hear if others have had similar experiences.

 

Nearly half of my connections don't work or update. It tells me to manually refresh them, which I do, but they still do not accurately reflect my account balances, which causes all my reporting and consolidations to be off.

I have been getting the refresh error for the past 3 months, which is significantly longer than it should take to resolve. Monarch no long provides accurate snapshots of my financials, and yet is still charging me to be a financial budget program? What is the timeline to resolve? Been a dedicated user for 2+ years but this is ridiculous and there has to be better options out there

I'm cleaning up my recurring section and noticed a problem with a few services I'm leaving. I've already connected the companies, but Monarch still has future payments listed based on the old charge history. I don't want to remove the merchants because I still want those past payments included in my spending history.

For now I'm leaving them there and checking whether another charge appears, but that gets messy when there are several at once.

Is there a better way to mark these in Monarch without removing the old transactions?

My husband recently got a login so that we could both share our Monarch subscription to track and plan our finances. We started to have arguments about how to categorize spending. I'm more concerned with tracking expenses for budget compliance and tax purposes, but he is far more invested in future planning and wants to apply some of our expenses to his "buckets." It's hard to explain concisely, but one example is travel expenses. He has a yearly travel budget, but we have to buy a lot of those things months or even a year in advance. He wants to be able to either create categories so those expenses go into a particular trip, or at least the year we actually use the travel, not when we spend the money.

I realized that it would be awesome if we could continue to share and access the same accounts and data, but each have our own way of categorizing and tracking. The only other solution right now is to buy two separate subscriptions.

Heads up for anyone considering turning on the Investment Transactions Early Access feature: I did this and it added a ton of erroneously-categorized transactions to years worth of my accounts. I've since turned it off and am now manually going through years worth of transactions and finding investment transactions misclassified as everything from interest to Check (?!). I'm sure others may have better experiences, but I'd strongly advise against using this.

Now my cashflow data is all screwed up. I'm trying to triage by size of transaction to fix my cash flow, but I fear it'll never truly recover. Not the way I wanted to spend my Saturday afternoon.

Forecasting looks promising and is exactly what I expect to get from Monarch, but having it locked behind yet another tier or add on paywall is pretty frustrating.

When most of us subscribed to Monarch, it was with the expectation that core personal finance management tools including basic projections and cash flow forecasting would be part of the premium product we are already paying a yearly subscription for. Locking core features into a higher tier starts to dilute the value of the main subscription for long term users.

It is great that the team is actively developing the platform, but basic forecasting should not feel like an enterprise upsell. Please consider including core forecasting functionality for all standard paid subscribers.

I've had Venmo transactions working with MM for a long time, but I just noticed that it's now "double counting" in the sense that the bank->venmo transaction is actually pulling in the recipient's name like the similar Venmo transaction. So -- MM is now confused and is essentially double counting vs before treating it as a bank->venmo transfer (or vice versa)

Anyone else seeing this? Or am I losing my mind? Below is an example of where this was "working" before in Aug but is now double counting in Oct.

https://preview.redd.it/t5nwguupe9th1.png?width=2140&format=png&auto=webp&s=5121c36378e13bff08abd57d9dcb9e80d946052a

It seems like Monarch really expects you to transfer money toward a Goal. I don't think or care about my accounts in that way. Sometimes I move excess cash from one brokerage to another one in order to buy some bonds or CDs. Sometimes I move excess cash from that account to my bank in order to buy a CD. Sometimes I move cash around into different bank accounts to ensure there's enough for an upcoming large credit card payment following a trip.

Understanding the money I have is an abstraction on top of my various accounts. I know I have $X money and it doesn't matter to me which accounts they are in.

Goals doesn't seem to work properly unless I've specifically allocated a certain amount of money in a certain account toward a specific Goal. If I move a chunk to another account for reasons, then I've no longer allocated money toward that Goal.

Does anyone have success working with Goals despite treating their accounts as fungible?

I love Monarch. I have organized my finances with and around Monarch for the last 3 years. The connection issues are killing me, and yes yes, can't do better than provider etc etc. But here's a self goal - when I do manage to reconnect an account using a different provider, and then try to use "Transfer" function, I get stuck with "Monarch is completing the initial setup for your accounts in the background. You'll be able to continue when the sync is complete. This can take a couple minutes". And by couple of minutes, I think Monarch means a few weeks? I haven't been able to get these to resolve ever. I did use "Switch provider" on one of my accounts, and it worked beautifully, but for another account, I only have two options: "Refresh" and "Update login". And neither work, so I was able to link the account again using "Add account". But now I have two accounts from the same org, and no way to consolidate, because "initial setup".

Just want to start out by saying that MM as a software is immensely valuable to me. This feature, though, has like a 5% accuracy rate.

My recurring transaction strategy is just to use it for transactions that come out of my checking account (CC bills, rent, HSA/roth contributions) so I know I have enough in my checking to cover them.

It pretty consistently categorizes things like dividends, sinking fund transfers, cash back, and all sorts of bits and bobs as recurring, which I can't think is useful for its intended purpose.

It causes me a ton of clicks at the beginning and end of months and is kind of a frustrating experience.

Love you guys though, MM is a fantastic product