r/MonarchMoney

Hi folks,

A while back, we had to pause our MCP product. I wanted to provide an update here. Unfortunately, the MCP remains paused for now, but we continue to work on finding a path that can bring it back. It’s not what we want, but we want to provide as much transparency as possible so you can understand the why behind the pause a little better and know that we’re working hard on our end to bring it back.

To provide some context:

• We (Monarch) are of the view that this is your data. We’ve done our best to provide ways for you to access it, modify it, and export it as you see fit. MCP was one of those ways. We think that you should have the choice to decide when, if, and how your data is shared. Some of you do not want to share your data with AI at all. Others do. It's ultimately your choice. For us, it’s really that simple.
• Unfortunately, the financial data ecosystem is not so simple. In addition to us (Monarch) and you (users), there are also data aggregators and financial institutions, each with their own views and concerns about data portability. Until Open Banking regulation (like CFPB’s “1033”) or some other mechanism establishes clear lines, things will continue to be murky.
• Not everyone in the financial data ecosystem views data portability the way we do, so we must be careful not to jeopardize your continued access to your financial data through Monarch.

We’ve spent a lot of time over the past few weeks having conversations and proposing different ways to alleviate their concerns, and while we’ve made progress, we haven’t found a full solution quite yet. We’ll continue working on this path until we find one, and as soon as we do, we will provide an update.

In the meantime:

• While we can't officially endorse these tools, we’ve seen many users rally around third-party, community-built APIs and MCPs.
• We will continue providing safe ways for you to access your data. For example, we’ve launched CSV import by id so you can more easily export your transactions, modify them, and re-import them.
• We’ve built and are testing a flow that lets you easily switch your connection to your financial institutions from one connector to another (similar to the account transfer flow, but more of a seamless lift-and-shift) in case certain aggregators end up not providing a path we agree with. This tool will eventually be launched for general usage, too.

Again, we apologize that this isn’t the answer you are hoping for. It’s not the one we were hoping for, either, but we’ll continue to provide updates as things evolve.

Just found the 'company equity' thing - neat! I have a few NSO grants over the year, nice to see the vesting schedule and such.

One thing I wish is I could get a relatively true 'net worth' reflection: adding the gross doesn't quite make sense - where I'm at I'll be paying ~40% taxes were I to exercise them. I'd rather see that haircut vs getting irrationally excited by a less-conservative number.

For now I've 'excluded' it from my net worth and manually add the 40% reduced value as a separate account - would be nice if this was automatic; but i'm guessing maybe different tax jurisdictions/areas might complicate this?

Anyone else have any other solutions they've done?

Just looking for input/opinions. I just joined Costco for the first time & I’m wondering how y’all categorize wholesale club membership fees.

I’d like to create a separate category, logically, but I don’t have anything comparable. What do y’all do?

Even in Flex Budget, I really can't stand the subcategories, I'll be honest. It's just not how my brain functions when thinking about our money. I don't want to set a number for how much I'll spend on clothes, movies, restaurants, etc. each month because our drive for each of those things is so variable. Some months we'll be really drawn to going the movies, others not. Some we'll really be into going out to dinner, some we won't. Some months I'll buy clothes, sometimes I won't.

I care more about knowing whether our money is going toward essentials or non-essentials. Are we being frivolous with our non-essential spending? Do we need to rein that in? Or is life (our essentials) just getting more expensive, and if so, where can we cut back or negotiate on some of those things?

Anything we don't spend, I want going to savings. I don't have a set goal for that either. I want as much as possible. We max out our Roths, we have our emergency fund, but we still want to keep building that cushion for unexpected or guaranteed future large expenses (cars, ATV, home improvement projects).

So long story short, I'm considering making the following change to our budget:

Within the two major categories (Fixed and Variable) I would have two subcategories each (Essential and Non-Essential).

• Fixed Essential - Mortgage, insurance, utilities, required bills, dog food subscription, gym membership (debatable), car registration, etc.
• Fixed Non-Essential - Streaming services, fun subscriptions, other non-essential, automated charity donations, etc.
• Variable Essential - Groceries, gas, medical co-pays, repairs, propane, vet visits, auto maintenance, etc.
• Variable Non-Essential - Restaurants, shopping, entertainment, decor, convenience spending, etc.

I'm trying to decide if I would regret making this change and how it might affect Monarch's automatic categorization. If it's just going to make more work for me in the end. What would be some potential flaws in this system you could foresee?

Connection to Vanguard 401k (aka My Vanguard Plan or Ascensus) has never been great. I manually connect and then it disconnects so after. But since last week I can no longer connect at all, so my 401k can’t be tracked.

Is there any background info on this?

In case anyone else has this problem, it’s a known issue:
 
“The Discover it Miles account ending in XXXX is currently missing from the connection because Discover/Capital One isn’t sharing that account data with our integration provider, even though the account is visible when you log in directly on the bank’s website.
 
This is a known issue affecting many Discover accounts that recently migrated to Capital One. The investigation is still ongoing, but we don’t have an ETA for a fix to share just yet.
 
While I know this isn’t ideal, as a workaround, you can still manually track your account in the meantime.”

:(

Short backstory: YNAB helped me get out of debt, helped me stop living paycheck to paycheck, and taught me to be much better with my money. But, after I got out of debt, got married, had a kid, and started being more financially stable, YNAB's core philosophy and the way it does things became less and less important. I'm more interested in seeing where money went, sinking funds, and reports.

Currently, my wife and I are very much a HIS, HERS and OURS financial household. We have our own personal checking/savings/credit cards, and joint checking/savings/credits cards. (please, let's not turn this into a discussion about combining finances, this works for us right now)

I am the YNAB user, and I handle basically all of our shared accounts.

In YNAB, I have a MINE budget and an OURS budget. And I basically treat OURS like a tracker. At the end of the month, I will budget for next month...lets say that's $3000 worth of expenses (bills, spending, sinking funds) and I note any overspending for the current month...let's say we went $500 over budget (I purposely let RTA go red) and I will add that together, $3500, divide it by two, $1750...and on the 1st, we will both transfer $1750 to the joint account, and the RTA will go green again.

I'm having a hard time kind of wrapping my head around how I might do this in Monarch.

Would there be an easy, accurate way of knowing how much each of us should transfer to our joint account on the 1st of every month?

Is there any fix to my spending going down the 13th of each month causing a dip due to my mortgage payment showing up a couple days before the debit from my checking account?

I see there are enhancements in reclassifying holdings.

https://preview.redd.it/yxjtt9adx0kh1.png?width=984&format=png&auto=webp&s=7bea12b69ed6402c1949f6192995516595b6221e

However, I have over 150 to correct - at least. This makes it difficult.

I am hoping on the higher level, you can click on that and make these adjustments. When you do, it will make changes to ALL the underlying holdings.

For example, I click on the International Bonds level >, and then the side panel opens. I set the values there. There is no way I can just sit here and click click click (it's 450+ clicks to correct my holdings) .... Or I can use MCP? :-)

Is there any way to make it so non monthly expenses don't completely screw up my monthly budget?

The Non Monthly category doesn't seem fully implemented unless I am missing something?

Whenever I have add a annual expense it acts like the entire expense is budgeted against that month?

I just linked my fidelity account which has a $35000 investment in federal home loan bank bonds.

I have 35000 shares, a balance of $34852.10 and the quoted price today is $98.806.

Monarch says I have a balance of $3458210! They multiplied the share price by the number of shares. But agency bonds have prices that are actually percentages - $98.806 actually means 98.806% of 35000 shares. per share.

What’s the best way manage large one-time expenses, like trips or house projects?

I’ve been saving up to replace my driveway and have a related savings goal. When I’m charged, it’ll hit my Home Expense category, but my budget only has my standard monthly budget amount.

My IRA and mortgage are through Wells Fargo, but whenever I try to connect, via Finicity or Plaid (MX doesn't even load), I enter my WF name and password, and WF says to "give us a call". I called them and talked to them for 45 minutes and they are completely clueless. In the end, the agent said they spoke to another agent who said that Monarch just doesn't work with WF and to use Quicken instead, which is obviously BS.

I can log into WF with no problem using the WF app or website. I've tried all sorts of things, like turning 2 factor auth on, creating a passkey, etc... it still tells me to call WF, and it's not just an automated number to get a code to log in - it's their main customer support number.

This issue is likely on the WF side, not the Monarch side, but I wanted to see if anyone else ran into anything similar. No issues with any of my other accounts. I've used a Google Voice number as my main phone number since Google Voice was first released, and I know virtual numbers are a red flag in many systems now, so I tried deleting that number and putting in my real mobile number, but that didn't help either...

Is it possible that connect claude ?

How has it improved your financial journey? For context, I am 34m, currently living solo and tracking all my financial assets/expenses using an excel template I found online years ago.

I am now moving in with my partner soon and I expect my bills to change. I figured this is a good time to refresh how I track it too.

Edit: thank you for all your thoughts and sharing your experience! I’m going to do the trial and pay for the discounted rate for year one!