My early review on Monarch Money

I fired up Monarch Money (budgeting/overall finance tracker) last week and got everything connected last week. My wife and I had been using a combination of Empower Personal Dashboard (used to be Personal Capital) and Everydollar between budget and overall financial tracking. I was tired of kind of using both and wished there just 1 place I could connect everything to use to budget and track overall finances (including investments, etc). Also felt like everydollar was a little bit basic in terms of the cost of it.

So anyways, they give you a 7 day free trial of Monarch Money and I have to say after almost a week I'm truly impressed. This is everything I wish everydollar/empower dashboard could have been in 1 and maybe even a little more. The most impressive stuff to me is the feedback you can give on ideas they think they could implement in the future or give your feedback on current features. Keep in mind Monarch money hasnt been around that long so it will get contiously updated over time.

The first surprise I had was connecting our few dozen accounts, everything actually connected without issue the first time except Vanguard which was a Vanguard issue that was resolved the next day and got it connected. IT seemed like Empower's site and even everydollar to a lesser extent would lose connection a little too often to my liking. I havent lost connection yet (its been a week, but thats a good sign at least).

Monarch is divided into 10 different sections basically:

Dashboard - This is basically the "summary" page if you will over everything. It will quickly show you spending this month vs. last month (this week vs. last week or this month vs. same month last year...all neat features). Your overview of how your budget is going int the month, most recent transactions, net worth, recurring charges coming up, goals and achievement of those and your investments.

Accounts - This is where you link all your accounts, it shows the balances of all the accounts and it shows a great breakdown of net-worth (monthly, quarterly and yearly options) over time.

Transactions - Pretty straight forward here, but this is all the transactions that happen across all the accounts you connected and where you can assign a category of spend/income for them. They also are smart enough to have a "Transfer" section where you put a few categories of things you dont want to count as income/expense. Like say a dividend in a retirement account that gets reinvested, you can call it a "dividend" and then a "buy" as reinvestment and since it's under the transfer section wont affect your budget as a income/expense.

Awesome side note - they have venmo integration, so instead of going back and trying to figure out say all the venmos you had in a month were like on most budgeting software because it gives no description (just the venmo in/our of bank account), it brings over the description of the venmo so you can see it right there. One "idea" they are working on right now is Amazon integration as well so you can see what the amazon purchases are (freaking about time someone does this). They also have pretty dang good AI here to auto-assign stuff and you can create rules for recurring things. Like we have checks we write to daycare each week so every "check" for "x amt" it will auto assign to child care expense for us which is nice.

Cash Flow - Exactly what you think, but it shows you monthly/quarterly/yearly cash flow over time, and also shows the breakdown below the graph of income/expenses by category/grouping of category/ and by merchant if you want.

Reports - This is in "beta" right now but this is a big reason I like Monarch. You can slice and dice cash flow/spending/income and even see a Sankey diagram (if you're a visual person) here. Can export anything in csv to see it in excel as well. But this section is pretty powerful for the true nerds out there.

Budget - Obviously this is where you do your budget. The layout is very simple and hides all the categories you dont use (Can unhide easily to see them if you want to). It's smart enough after I uploaded account history to create a budget really close to reality before I even put in anything. Yo ucan alos change to a "forecast" view which shows actuals so far this year vs. budget for rest of year which for a person who works in finance is a very cool thing to see.

Recurring - This is where it tries to predict your recurring expenses/income in the month and when it will hit on a big calendar of the current month. Obviously the more data it gets over time the better it will become, but cool to see projected paychecks and recurring expenses by specific dates on a calendar.

Goals - This is where you can set specific goals and TRACK them with linked accounts which is a nice feature. For example we are building back up an emergency fund and the money going to that account I just link to that goal and it shows how much we have compared to goal % achievement, etc...I also have a retirement goal and linked all our retirement accounts so it automatically tracks that as well. But there's a dozen or so different goals you can set here and then link accounts relevant to it to track them. Different forms of paying off debts, etc...

Investments - This is where it shows all your investment accounts. Your holdings, allocation, and shows your portfolio vs. the S&P 500 and all US stocks and all US bonds in a graph over whatever time period you select (1W, 1M, 3M, 6M, YTD, 1Y, 5Y. The cool part to me here is there's a quick filter where you select just 1 account or multiple accounts and quickly see this view. So if you want to see all retirement accounts you can look at just that. If you want to see taxable brokerage accounts you can see just that...quick way to slice and dice and see performance.

Advice - This is one thing I havent used but you can answer questions here and someone helps you out with whatever you want help with. Cant really give much more of a review than that since I havent used it.

There's also a "Help and Support" section which is where you can see their "Ideas" for the future and give your feedback, and also give feedback on current/new features how they might modify that. 1 thing they recently launched was vehicle asset tracking but they do it via a VIN based lookup. The issue with this is it doesnt show condition of vehicle or mileage maybe in some cases too. These are things that vastly affect the value of a car. So our cars look a bit over valued right now, like my wife's MDX they say is worth over $15k but Kelly Blue Book on it between $9k-$11k private party basically with decent miles on it and "good" not very good/excellent condition. I put in feedback they simply let you manually override the amount and put in what you want there or try kelly blue book integration to get more true private party value of a vehicle. But its a quick and easy place to provide feedback to better the platform which is pretty cool.


So yeah, overall a pretty cool tool and one that is making me dump everydollar and empower personal dashboard. It's $99/yr which is reasonable considering the options out there. They are offering a mint promotion of people leaving mint wanting to upload their history they will give you a 50% discount for year 1 which is a nice perk for those of you on mint and looking for a new platform.