Plan for retirement, track your business, and protect what you've built. Monarch Plus gives you everything you need to go deeper and model your financial future to discover your ideal plan.

We spend a lot of time talking to our members, hearing from you how Monarch can help with your specific financial needs. This has been core to our DNA from the day we founded Monarch.

A lot of you have told us your financial lives have gotten more complex. You're not just tracking spending anymoreyou're earning from multiple income sources, planning further ahead, and wondering what would happen if you took a career break or finally committed to a kitchen remodel. You've told us you want Monarch to grow with you, and to help you make informed decisions about your future.

Today, we're introducing Monarch Plus: a new premium tier built for members with more complex financial situations and a desire to go deeper.

Forecasting: Model your financial future to discover your ideal plan

One of the challenges with managing your financial life is understanding how your short-term decisions impact your longer-term goals. If we cut back on dining, how does that change when we buy a home? If one of us takes a career break, what happens to our retirement timeline?

Until now, answering those questions meant hiring a financial advisor, building a complicated spreadsheet, or using a separate planning tool disconnected from your real accounts. Because your spending history, income, accounts, and debt are already in Monarch, Forecasting can show you where you're headed without hours of setup. Open it for the first time, provide a few quick inputs, and your baseline projection is already waiting.

Your financial future, mapped out. At the center of Forecasting is a net worth projection that plots where you're headed based on how you actually spend and save today. Your income, expenses, and account balances are pulled in automatically and extended into the future, with assumptions you can adjust as you see fit.

Model life events on a timeline. The big decisionsbuying a home, having a kid, retiring, taking a career breakall have longer-term impact that are hard to model in your head. In Forecasting, you can add these events directly to your timeline and watch your projection update in real time. Want to see what happens if you retire at 58 instead of 65? Drag the event and find out. Thinking about a home purchase in three years? Add it and see how it changes your trajectory.

Built to explore. We designed Forecasting around the idea that the best way to understand your finances is to play with them. Change an assumption, move or add an event and the math updates instantly so you can see how one decision flows through everything else. Model different scenarios and see how it can help you make decisions with more confidence and less mental math.

How to get started: Head to Forecasting on desktop web, add a few life events, and start exploring.

Monarch for Business Owners: Your business and personal finances, finally in one place

If you run a business, freelance on the side, or own a rental property, you know the challenge: your business finances and personal finances are deeply connected, but most tools force you to manage them separately.

Most of you have been handling this with spreadsheets, a separate app, or creative workarounds inside Monarch. Monarch for Business Owners is the real solution track income and expenses for your LLC, side hustle, or rental property right alongside your personal finances, with clean separation between them.

Separate where it matters, connected where it counts. Each business entity gets its own filter you can apply across your accounts, transactions, and reports so you can zero in on just your business without it bleeding into your personal budget and cash flow.

Know what your business is actually making. Each entity gets built-in P&L reporting: a straightforward income vs. expense breakdown by month, quarter, or year. No separate tools or calculation required, just a clear answer to the question you actually care about.

Tax season is a review, not a scramble. Track your business income and expenses throughout the year and when tax time arrives, you'll have a Schedule C tax prep doc ready to export and hand to your accountant. No digging through old bank statements, no wondering what you missed.

How to get started: After starting your Plus trial, head to the business set up page on desktop web, create your business(es), and assign the appropriate accounts and transactions to it. From there, customize your new dashboard widget and explore the new business reports available on the reporting page.

Note: Monarch for Business Owners is designed for pass-through entity owners including sole proprietors, single-member LLCs, freelancers, and rental property owners. It's built for tracking income and expenses and does not include invoicing, payroll, or payroll tax features.

Advanced Investment Analysis - Clarity for your most complex assets

Monarch has always shown you your investment balances and performance. But we've heard from many of you that you want to go deeper. Plus adds two new capabilities to do exactly that.

Fund Analysis, powered by Morningstar, breaks down your holdings across asset classes so you can understand your diversification and risk exposure in one view.

Gains & Losses gives you a different lens on your investments: showing you what they're truly worth based on what you originally paid, not just what they're valued at today.

What's coming next

We'll keep adding to Monarch Plus over time, and we're excited to hear from you what you'd like to see us build next. We're here to make sure Monarch Plus helps you manage additional layers of financial planning and complexity, with the same simplicity and clarity that have been core to Monarch from the beginning.

Try it out and help us shape the future of Plus

Monarch Plus will be priced at $299 per year. Current Monarch members receive $100 off of their first year, and for a limited time, Plus also includes a free will via our partner Trust & Will (a $299 value).

You can explore Plus with a 7-day trial. Note that youll want to explore and set up these features on desktop web.

Whatever you're building toward, Plus gives you a way to actually know you're on track.

As always, thanks for being part of this journey! Your feedback shapes what we build and well keep you posted with updates along the way!

Original source

Stop guessing about retirement, home buying, or career breaks. Monarch Forecasting uses your real data to model what-ifs and help you make financial decisions with confidence.

When will you be able to take a career break? How do you know if you can afford that dream house in three years? Will you have enough money to last your entire lifetime? It’s time to stop guessing or using tools with arbitrary numbers that don’t reflect your real life to find answers to these important questions using financial forecasting.

Introducing Forecasting, a new way in Monarch to discover a confident plan for your future. Your existing Monarch data connects to your forecast automatically and we’ve provided you with some common baseline assumptions, so you can instantly begin drawing insights from a forecast. This is a living plan that you can see, test, and trust — and as your life changes, your forecast will, too.

Why we built Monarch’s Forecasting tool

Finally, a forward-looking view

With Monarch, you can already see where your money is and where it's been. Forecasting shows you where it might be going and how major life events could affect your plan.

Goals help you plan and save toward specific targets. Forecasting connects those targets to each other and to the rest of your financial life, so you can see how they interact over time, especially when they affect each other.

Forecasts in Monarch are modeled projections of your finances across decades. Your initial forecast is built on default assumptions drawn from published financial research, and reviewed by credentialed financial experts with decades of real client experience. Every assumption is adjustable.

Major financial decisions — when to retire, whether you can afford the house, how starting a family will affect your finances — shouldn't require guesswork. Now they don't have to.

How Monarch’s Forecasting tool works

Answers on arrival & as life changes

Monarch’s Forecasting tool incorporates your real life data into long-term projections. You won’t spend time guessing what assumptions to make and if they are even close to ballpark accurate (i.e. income, spending, inflation, return rates, life event timing, etc.). This post will dive into the details of how and why we arrived at our default assumptions, which all come from deeply researched data.

You also won’t have to wonder if all the information plugged into the forecast is stale or outdated – Monarch gives you a living forecast that updates in real-time thanks to your linked accounts. This isn’t a static “moment in time” projection. Whenever something changes in an account you’re currently tracking with Monarch, you’ll see that automatically reflected in your forecast.

Play with your future

Monarch’s Forecasting tool lets you take a peek into what’s possible, with interactive features baked in along the way. While we give you a headstart by making several default assumptions, this tool is meant to be played with. You can tweak any variable and get instant feedback on how it may impact your financial future.

Want to see how changing your retirement age from 65 to 55 might affect the rest of your life? Want to buy a home in five years, but aren’t sure what price to pay? Experiment with different numbers and see how it plays out. Just click and drag to change any assumption or variable and you’ll instantly see it reflected in the forecast. There is no one right or wrong answer here, no single “best” plan for your financial life – just the trade-offs you are comfortable making in order to live the kind of life that fulfills your values.

Monarch’s Forecasting tool is designed to be explored, not perfected. After all, no matter how precisely you plan your future, life changes quickly and often. This tool is meant to help you move in the right direction and give you the info you need to make more confident decisions for yourself along the way.

Key assumptions behind your Forecast

Most forecasting tools demand extensive data entry: from income to expenses, investment growth, and inflation, it then only delivers a snapshot that's outdated in a moment’s notice.

Other tools leave you guessing the second anything shifts. Monarch is built differently, with flexibility and directional accuracy at its core, based on your real aggregated data.

To get you started without hours of setup, we've made some sensible default assumptions. They're designed to give most people a solid, directionally correct foundation. You can always adjust them to see how they shape your forecast. Let's walk through them.

General assumptions

First, there are general assumptions that tell us basic things like how old you are and what your current net worth is. Leaving the general assumptions as they are without any edits would represent a projection of your current financial trajectory, assuming there are no major discrepancies from your real life or big changes over time. Included are the following:

• Household members: We will automatically include anyone you’ve added to your Monarch Household as a member, but you can exclude them from the Forecast if you wish by simply unchecking the box next to their name.
• Your age: from your own input or else taken from what you told us in your Monarch Household Members settings.
• Take home income per year: This is the average of the last 12 complete months of actual household income from your Monarch data. If we don't have 12 months of data for you, we'll take however many months of data we do have and use them to estimate an average year.
• Living expenses per year: The average of the last 12 complete months of actual expenses from your Monarch budget are used as a baseline. If we don't have 12 months of data for you, we'll take however many months of data we do have and use them to estimate an average year.

Accounts

• Assets: You’ll have a chance to pick which assets you’d like to include in your Forecast while setting it up. All of the financial assets enabled in your Monarch net worth report are included by default, and non-financial assets (cars, homes, etc.) are not. This is because we assume any assets you include in your Forecast could be sold to pay for living expenses during periods when you’re not earning enough income, such as career breaks or retirement. If you wouldn’t sell it to pay for expenses, don’t include it in the Forecast tool.
• Liabilities: All debt accounts that are “enabled” in your Monarch Goals Paydown tab are included by default, but you’ll have the chance to include any other debt accounts in your Forecast while setting it up, even if you’re not actively working on paying them down more quickly. Make sure to only include credit cards that you are NOT paying in full every month. We also bring over any info you’ve given us about the interest rates and planned monthly payments (or minimum monthly payments, if planned is blank) for each of the enabled debt accounts. If you update those values in the Paydown tab, we’ll also apply the changes to your forecast unless you manually override those values in your forecasting options.

Current income sources

While setting up your forecast for the first time, we’ll prompt you to tell us your current income sources. We’ll start you off with an estimate of total household take-home income over the past 12 months split evenly between all the members of the household, but be sure to update these figures if they don’t match your reality or remove income sources that you don’t want to rely on for your forecast. Make sure that you’re entering net income only, meaning income after taxes and deductions.

If you have variable income, use a rough estimate of how much net income you expect to make per year, on average, at a minimum. It’s better to underestimate your income and have more than you expected than to overestimate and not have enough.

If you’re a business owner and you pay taxes or business expenses out of pocket, you can either leave those in your income and include them in your living expenses, or exclude them from both income and expenses.

Yearly Inflation and Investment Growth Rates

Based on historical averages and forward projection research, Monarch defaults to the following growth rates on each type of asset, but you can adjust any of them if you wish:

• Savings: 3%. The savings rate is based on expert projections for the average interest rate on cash savings in the US over the next 10 years, which is about 3%.
• Investments: 7%. The investment rate of growth is based on a projection of what financial experts think will happen to a diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds over the next 10 years, otherwise known as a forward projection.
• Real estate: 3%. The real estate growth rate is conservatively based on the inflation rate, since the primary purpose for most owners of real estate is housing, not investment growth.
• Extra savings: 3%. If you don’t tell us where you want them to go, extra savings will grow at the rate for Savings accounts. Otherwise, you can tell us specifically what accounts you want the extra savings to go into and they will grow accordingly.
• Vehicles: -15%. This represents the average decrease in value of most passenger vehicles per year, but you can change it to reflect your own estimates if you prefer.
• Anything else: Defaulted to 3% historical inflation rate.

Inflation rate: The default inflation rate is 3%. This is based on the historical long-term average rate of inflation. We assume throughout the forecast projections that your income and expenses are growing by the rate of inflation.

How did we get to 3% inflation, 7% rate of return for investments, and 3% growth of expenses? It’s all based on research and historical data. According to the Federal Reserve, over the last century, inflation has averaged about 3% -- and yes, the past five years have brought the average inflation rate back from 1-2% per year in the 2000s and 2010s to the 3% per year long-term historical average, so they fit with our expectations. The 7% rate of return for investments is based on what experts expect over the next 10 years for returns on a diversified portfolio with a mix of stocks and bonds.

These assumptions are not set in stone. If you want to see how increased inflation might affect your long term plans, you can change this variable to a higher number. If you want to be a bit more aggressive in your investment strategy and model out what a 9% rate of return will do, you can tweak that as well. All the variables are based on real data, but can be amended to your preferences.

Anticipated life events

There are several common life events and milestones that you can add to your forecast at any time. We also made default assumptions for these life events as well, but members can change them to fit their needs. A few life events we’ve included are buying a home, having a kid, retiring, Social Security, and general expense and income events that can be customized to your life. We have even more pre-built life events coming soon!

Here’s what we’ve assumed for each:

Have a Kid

Deciding whether to have a child through childbirth or adoption is not only extremely personal, but often out of our control. Monarch has made the following default assumptions:

• Years of child expenses: defaults to 13 years to reflect that the majority of child expenses are related to childcare, which tend to only apply for the first part of a child’s life. You can and should adjust this.
• Yearly child expenses: defaults to $18,000, which is based on national averages, but you should adjust this number according to your childcare plans and any other ongoing expenses, including education, food, clothing, healthcare, kid activities, etc.
• Upfront child costs: defaults to $4,500. These are one-time costs related to childbirth, adoption, fertility treatments, family leave, or other set up expenses incurred only in the first year of the child’s life, and are based on national averages. You should update this to reflect your specific situation and include things such as adoption or fertility treatment costs, other costs that aren’t covered by insurance, furnishings, clothing, accessories, etc.

End of Plan

It’s not something most people like to think about, but planning all the way to the end of your life can help you understand if your money is going to last long enough. Monarch makes the following default assumptions:

• Life expectancy is age 90. This age is based on the upper end of US life expectancy and is purposefully more conservative than average life expectancy to make sure that you don’t run out of money if you live longer. You should adjust this based on your own family history.

Social Security

For Social Security income, we’ve made the following assumptions:

• Begin taking Social Security at age 65.
  • The age you can start collecting your full Social Security retirement benefit is 67 years old for most people in the US, depending on your date of birth, but you can start taking retirement benefits as early as age 62 or as late as age 70. On average, most people start taking benefits around age 65 so we’ve set this as the default, but you should adjust to reflect your desired starting age.
• Default benefit amount of $2,000 per month.
  • This amount is based on the current national average and is updated annually in January, but we link out to the Social Security Administration calculator so you can get a more accurate estimate for your own situation.

Retirement

Everyone should anticipate they’ll no longer be able to work at some point. What retirement looks like and how much paid work you might do during it is a personal decision and the choices are wide ranging, so Monarch made the following assumptions:

• We’ll create a retirement event for each household member you select to include in the Forecasting tool.
• Default retirement age of 65 years old. This is roughly the average age of retirement in the US, but you should play around with it to see what’s possible for you.
• Living expenses: defaults to assume that expenses at retirement remain the same as current spending, adjusted for inflation. Most people don’t want to have to dramatically reduce their lifestyle upon retirement. You can change your spending in retirement with our simple sliding scale if you anticipate spending more or less after you stop working than you spend now.
• Additional yearly expenses: defaults to $6,500 based on average out-of-pocket healthcare expenses for those age 65 and older. You should update this to include anything else you’d specifically want to spend on during retirement, unless it’s already included by adjusting your spending slider to spend more during retirement.
• Income reduction: 100%. Monarch’s default assumption is that all of your income will stop when you retire. You can change this setting if you plan to work part-time or if your partner will continue to work.

Other Life Events

There may be other life events you are planning for that aren’t included among the ones listed above. We plan to keep expanding our event type library to give you quick ways to add common life events, but in the meantime, you can use the “Expense” event to model out scenarios like buying a car, starting a business, saving for a wedding, or paying for education. You can use an “Income” event to model out scenarios like an inheritance, bonus, or new job.

For these event types, we default to a one-time Expense or Income event, but you’re welcome to use the recurring type instead if it’s something that will happen more than once.

• Use a one-time Expense event for things like a wedding, replacing a car, a once-in-a-lifetime vacation, a boat or RV, or other big one-off costs.
• Use a one-time Income event for things like getting a windfall from an inheritance, bonus, company buyout, or tax refund.
• Use a recurring Expense event for things like big vacations you take every year (that aren’t already included in your regular expenses), starting a business (which often aren’t profitable until the second or third year), or paying for education.
• Use a recurring Income event for things like starting a new job that pays more than your current income or annual distributions from a trust that start in the future.

Buy a Home

Based on historical averages and in-depth research, Monarch has chosen the following default assumptions for buying a home:

• Finance vs. Pay Cash: We default the setting to Finance a home purchase, since that’s what the vast majority of home buyers use, but if you’re planning to buy a property outright, you can choose the Pay Cash option instead.
• Down payment amount: defaults to 20% of purchase price. Monarch uses 20% as the default down payment since it is the amount required to avoid private mortgage insurance (PMI) on most mortgages. PMI is an additional expense that may be required if you put down less than 20% on a home purchase.
  • It may be helpful to know that the average down payment for first time home buyers in the US is more like 5-10%. The more you put towards a down payment, the lower your monthly payments on a loan will be. Just be sure to leave 2-3 months of expenses or more in savings for emergencies, which you have a higher risk of once you purchase a property.
• Mortgage: Standard 30 year conventional loan. This is what most home buyers in the US use to purchase a property. You can change this to a 15 year mortgage if that’s what you’ll be using instead.
• Mortgage interest rate: 6.5%. This is based on the previous 52-week average rate of a 30 year conventional loan for a single family home and is updated annually in January, but you can change it if rates have changed.
• Property taxes: 1% of purchase price. This is roughly based on the national average but varies greatly depending on your location, so be sure to adjust it to the area in which you are buying a home.
• Home insurance: 0.5% of purchase price. This is roughly based on the national average but again can vary greatly depending on location, so be sure to adjust as needed.
• Yearly home ownership costs: 1% of home value. Homes require ongoing maintenance and occasional repairs. As a general guideline, we recommend setting aside 1% of the value of your primary home each year to account for this. If the property will be rented out to others, you may need to set aside more like 2-4% of the home’s value per year.
• Replace existing Housing expenses: off. We don’t assume you’ll be replacing current monthly housing costs, but if you will be, turn this on and enter your current monthly payment here. For renters, this is the amount you would be spending on rent plus renter’s insurance. For homeowners, this amount should be the monthly amount you would spend on mortgage principal and interest, property taxes, and home insurance.

If you will be selling a home in order to buy a new one, you can add a corresponding Income event in the same year with the net amount you will make in profits from selling your home. This would be the selling price minus any fees to sell, mortgage payoff amounts, home equity loan or HELOC payoff amounts, and any other liens on your property that need to be repaid, such as past-due property taxes or solar panel loans.

Career Break

There’s really no standard for when and how long a person takes a career break. For some folks, a career break is more about taking a lower-paying job for a season with more time off and flexibility. For others, it’s a complete sabbatical with no income for a period. For that reason, you will input the following information for yourself:

• Event owner: defaults to the current user, but you can change this to any other household member.
• Start year: the start year is when you will begin your career break. We’ll assume you start your time off at the very beginning of the year that you select.
• End year: the end year is when you will end your break and return to work. We’ll assume you return to work at the very beginning of the year selected.
• Living expenses: defaulted to stay the same. Monarch makes the assumption your expenses will remain the same during a career break. If you plan to spend more or less, you can easily tweak this variable using the slider.
• Income reduction: 100% reduced. If you plan on taking a career break, Monarch’s default setting is a complete reduction in event owner’s income. If you will have part-time or just lower income, you can adjust this setting.
  • This reduction will only apply to the income for the person taking the career break. If you have another household member, their income will not be affected by this event.
  • If you are not going to take a full year break, you can set the start and end years to show one year of a break, then adjust the income reduction to reflect how much of the year you’ll be taking off. For example, if you’ll be taking 3 months off, you can set the income reduction to 25%. For 6 months off, set it to 50%.

Expense Withdrawal Order

When the Forecast projects that your expenses will be more than your income in a given year, it needs to pull money from somewhere. The order in which it draws down your accounts isn't arbitrary. It follows the logic our expert financial planners would use to protect as much of your wealth as possible over time. The order can be adjusted to your preferences, but we’d suggest leaving it as follows:

1. Extra savings
2. Cash accounts
3. Taxable brokerage accounts
4. Tax-deferred accounts (traditional IRA, 401(k), 403(b), 457, etc.)
5. Roth accounts (Roth IRA, Roth 401(k))
6. Tax-free accounts (HSAs, 529 plans)

The sequence moves from least tax-advantaged to most: cash first (including extra savings not allocated to other accounts that you may build up from years where your income exceeds your expenses), then taxable brokerage accounts, then tax-deferred retirement accounts like traditional IRAs and 401(k)s, then Roth accounts, and finally tax-free accounts like HSAs and 529s.

The goal is to keep the accounts with the biggest tax advantages compounding for as long as possible while first spending down the accounts where tax advantages are weakest. Monarch applies this automatically so the forecast you're looking at reflects what a thoughtful drawdown strategy would actually look like, but you are welcome to change the order at any time to reflect your situation and preferences.

Extra savings

When your income exceeds your savings, investments, and expenses in a given forecasted year, the surplus is considered to be “extra savings” and needs somewhere to go. We assume as a default that they will go into a savings account earning a little bit of interest. You have the option to split these extra savings into your specific savings accounts or to have them go into investment accounts if you prefer.

Some folks may want to increase their ongoing or one-time expenses instead if they know they are unlikely to set aside unspent money in real life. Just remember: the more realistic you are with yourself about your own habits, the more realistic your forecast will be.

Paycheck contributions

Since Monarch mainly gets net (after taxes and deductions) aka take-home pay information from your bank account transaction history, we could be missing some very important info on contributions you are making to accounts through your paycheck. You can add these in for any retirement account to which you are contributing regularly by going to the account in the list of Assets under Net Worth, then clicking on the gear icon to change the account settings.

These are the default settings for paycheck contributions:

• Yearly paycheck contribution: blank. You should add in any contributions you are doing directly from your paycheck since Monarch doesn’t yet capture those in your transactions. Enter this as a dollar amount. You can play around with the amount of the contributions to see how they affect your forecast.
• Contribution growth rate for accounts: 3%, taken directly from the inflation rate. We assume that your contributions will not be static over time but will grow with inflation. This is not currently adjustable per account.

Taxes

One very impactful but difficult to estimate part of personal finance is taxes. We don’t know exactly where tax rates will land in a couple of years, much less in 30 or more years, and even small changes in tax rates could have big impacts on your finances in the long term. Also, taxes can be complicated with many layers to consider, especially as your finances get more complex. For our initial release of this tool, we’ve decided to work with high level historical averages and current info, then estimate conservatively, in order to give you results that still help lead you in the right direction without getting too far into the weeds. With that in mind, Monarch made the following default assumptions for tax rates in our Forecasting tool:

• Taxable accounts (such as brokerage and savings accounts):
  • Capital gains rate: 15% tax on profits made from selling an investment. You can adjust this to 0% if you’re in the lowest income tax bracket or 20% if you’re in the highest tax brackets.
  • Taxable portion of withdrawals: 80% of each withdrawal taken from a taxable account will be considered profits from selling investments and will be taxed at the capital gains tax rate. To get this closer to your own actual percentage, add up the amount of profits you’d make on all your investments in taxable accounts if you sold everything right now and divide it by the total value of all your taxable account investments, then enter that percentage in this field.
• Retirement or tax-deferred accounts (such as IRAs, 401(k)s, and 529 plans):
  • Income tax rate during retirement: 20% on any income considered to be taxable, including withdrawals from pre-tax accounts or tax-deferred accounts. Adjust this if you think your tax rate on income during retirement will be different

We’re taking a somewhat conservative approach as it relates to taxes, because if our default assumptions aren’t applicable to your situation, we’d prefer it to result in you having more money rather than less. We chose a 15% rate for capital gains because that’s what the vast majority of folks in the US pay right now for this kind of tax.

For withdrawals coming out of taxable accounts, we assume that 80% of any amounts you take came from profits made from selling investments. This is a pretty cautious guess, since we don’t know exactly how much profit you started out with in your accounts (yet - that information, called “cost basis” on your investments, will be integrated in the future!). This percentage could be a lot lower for you if you just bought an investment recently and it hasn’t grown much, or it could be a little higher if almost all the value of your investment is from its growth.

Lastly, the 20% tax rate during retirement is the national average. Your own tax rate might be lower or higher. For any of these rates, you can and should adjust them to your specific situation, but the defaults are meant to give a sense of what is likely for the majority of Monarch members.

Since we are working with net (after tax and paycheck deductions) information in your transaction history and aren’t making specific recommendations for investments, Roth conversions, or Roth vs. traditional (pre-tax) account contributions, we don’t yet calculate your current income tax rate in this tool.

How to Think About Assumptions

The forecasting tool is built on defaults, but your life isn’t average. The defaults are grounded in well-researched historical data, future projections, and best practices, which are a reasonable starting point but may not be exactly true for you. If you live in a higher cost of living area, know what your exact Social Security benefit will be, plan to retire at 62 instead of 65, or something else different from where we start you, be sure to update your inputs. After all, the more your assumptions match your actual situation, the more useful your results will be.

On the other hand, if you’re unsure of when you’d like to retire, start a family, or buy a home, the forecasting tool is an easy way to play around with these scenarios. Change a variable and you’ll see instantly how your hypothetical choices will impact your long-term finances, before you make a real life decision.

There’s no way to know how your life will play out over several decades, even if you’re mostly certain about what you want, and small input changes can create big swings. Changing the rate of return on investments from 7% to 8% or 6% can dramatically change your net worth when you have many years left in your plan. The same goes for inflation or tax rates. This is why Monarch doesn’t currently provide statistical probabilities or speak in absolutes. Because we work with your real time data, it’s best to take the results of a forecast from this tool and use them to determine if you are generally on the right track or if you need to make some broader changes in your strategy. The goal isn’t a precise prediction, it’s a clear direction to head in.

Monarch’s Forecasting was built for ease of use, but under the hood, it’s sophisticated in its methodology. Our team of engineers, designers, product managers, and financial experts are proud of their collaboration to make Forecasting a trusted tool you can use to play with your future.

What Monarch Features are Next?

This is just the first version of Forecasting. Expect more and frequent updates soon. In the short term, we'll be focusing on scenarios, additional event types, and more. Stay tuned!

FAQs

How can I use Monarch’s Forecasting tool?

Monarch’s Forecasting tool is a Plus feature that was created to help you see what’s possible in your financial future. It is designed to evolve and change along with your life. Major life decisions such as buying a home or retiring have massive financial implications. You can use Forecasting to see how those decisions affect your long-term net worth and cash flow depending on timing and inputs. The Forecasting feature isn’t a crystal ball, but instead should be used as a guide to make more informed financial decisions.

What is false precision vs directionally correct?

We’d rather be generally right than precisely wrong in forecasting your future finances. False precision refers to the idea that statistical likelihoods, exact cash flows, complex taxation rules, and net worth assumptions are only relevant and accurate in forecasts if your life remains exactly the same. We cannot predict what life will look like next week, much less in a decade. What we can do is send you in the right direction. By forecasting using well-researched assumptions and financial best practices, we can help you get closer to your overall goals. Nothing is for certain in life, so we won’t pretend that it’s possible to determine exact outcomes. Instead, being directionally correct allows for flexibility and pivots as new information comes into play.

Why are goals and forecasting separated?

Financial goals are fixed targets with deadlines. Forecasting is an estimation of what will happen to your finances based on data inputs. Forecasting is meant to be more flexible and change as new information and data becomes available. Goals, like saving for a down payment or retiring by a certain date, are aspirational and have a prescribed strategy in order to achieve them. Forecasting shows you the impact of those decisions. In many ways, they work in tandem and inform one another. For example, you may see your current retirement goal negatively impacts your long-term forecast and you’ll run out of money early. By adjusting your goal, your forecast will also change.

Why did we choose to present it this way visually and make it easy vs. using advanced statistical modeling and presenting a success rate?

There are a couple main reasons for why we chose to build Forecasting in this manner. First, we believe in being directionally correct over precisely wrong. We can take as much data into our calculations as possible, but we can’t account for the inevitable unknowns and surprises of life. Statistical probabilities are only as good as their inputs. For this reason, it’s best to know you’re heading in the right direction and have flexibility to pivot when needed.

Secondly, making features easier to use will encourage you to actually use them! By offering tools that are easy to manipulate, you don’t have to be a seasoned financial planner to understand how your choices will impact your money over the long-term.

Original source

What's New

January 21, 2026

Monarch is now proudly SOC 2 compliant

Ozzie Osman
Author

We're excited to share that Monarch has achieved SOC 2 Type II compliance. This independent certification verifies our security practices meet rigorous industry standards for protecting your data.

What is SOC 2 certification?
SOC 2 is like a health inspection for data security. An independent auditor thoroughly examines a company's infrastructure and operations to verify they meet strict standards for security, availability, and confidentiality.
Unlike self-reported security practices, SOC 2 means we opened our doors to outside experts who independently verified our security controls. From how we encrypt your bank connections to how we control employee access and monitor for threats, every aspect of our security has been tested and confirmed.

Why this matters
When you connect all your financial accounts to Monarch, you're trusting us with your complete financial picture. SOC 2 certification provides documented proof that we're protecting that data with rigorous standards and best-in-class practices.
While SOC 2 is a new milestone for us, the underlying security practices are not—we’ve built Monarch with these controls in mind from the beginning. What’s changed is that an independent auditor has now spent months to thoroughly test and verify that we’re operating them effectively over time.

SOC 2 compliance means:

• Independent verification – Third-party auditors confirm our security practices, not just our internal team
• Documented processes – Everything from employee access controls to incident response procedures is tested and verified
• Continuous accountability – We're held to these standards not just once, but on an ongoing basis
• Industry-recognized standards – SOC 2 is one of the most rigorous security certifications available

For our professional partners who use Monarch with clients, SOC 2 provides independent documentation for your compliance needs and the confidence to answer clients who ask whether Monarch is secure.

What’s next
Achieving SOC 2 certification is a significant milestone, but security is an ongoing commitment. We'll continue investing in the infrastructure, processes, and team needed to protect your financial data as we grow.
This certification joins our other security measures, including 256-bit encryption, multi-factor authentication, and read-only account access. Together, they create multiple layers of protection for your financial life.
Managing your money requires trust. We're committed to earning that trust every day with actions backed by independent verification and team of experts always keeping up the rigorous controls needed as technology evolves.

Original source

Release Notes

Say hello to your new AI Assistant, reimagined goals, equity tracking, and receipt scanning. Enter 2026 with new features to help you see more and do more with your money.

The best financial guidance helps you understand what's happening, why it matters, and what to do next….without making you do the heavy lifting.
That's the vision behind our latest release: to give you professionally-guided intelligence that looks after your finances, surfaces what matters most, and helps you plan ahead with confidence. From AI-powered insights to smarter goal planning to a complete view of your equity compensation, we’re dropping several new features designed to help you get ahead in 2026.

Meet your new AI Assistant

What if you had a financial expert who knew your complete financial picture and could answer any question, anytime? That's exactly what Monarch's AI Assistant does.
Your new AI Assistant isn't built from a single point of view or a black box algorithm. It's shaped by the collective wisdom of Monarch's panel of financial experts: CFPs, CFTs, PhDs, and financial coaches who have spent decades helping thousands of people navigate real financial decisions. These experts have helped inform the financial best practices, philosophies, and guidance that was used to train Monarch’s AI Assistant, in addition to reviewing and improving hundreds of questions and answers to ensure you’re getting answers that are clear, credible, and helpful.
The result? An AI Assistant that demonstrates professional level expertise, providing answers grounded in your unique financial picture.

Ask anything, get expert-informed answers

Whether you're wondering about a specific transaction, trying to understand a spending pattern, or thinking through a bigger financial decision, your AI Assistant is there to help.
Some examples of what you can ask:

• "Why did my net worth change this month?" Get a breakdown of what drove the change. Not just a number, but the story behind it
• "How should I approach paying off my debt?" Explore different strategies from the avalanche to the snowball method, based on your actual debts and monthly expenses
• "What did I overspend on?" Surface spending patterns you'd miss on your own, with context about why they matter
• "How much am I spending on groceries compared to last year?" Understand trends over time without manually digging through months of transactions
  Your AI Assistant understands your full financial picture and helps you make sense of it, anytime you need.

Never miss what matters

How often do you review your finances and wonder if you missed something important? New insights found throughout Monarch solve that by surfacing patterns, changes, and opportunities, so you can stay on top of things without living in the details. Just tap on the "sparkle" icon on select dashboard widgets as well as on the Accounts and Transaction pages to see instant, contextual insights.
You'll see insights like:

• Unusual spending in a particular category
• Net worth changes and what drove them
• Opportunities to optimize and save
  Our goal is simple: to surface what matters most so you don’t have to stay in the weeds every day.

Your Weekly Recap: We handle the details, you get the highlights

Every week, Monarch compiles a personalized summary of your financial activity: what changed, how your spending is trending, and what deserves your attention. Think of it as your weekly financial check-in, delivered automatically. Ask any follow-up questions you have, and your AI Assistant will be there to help with answers.
You can find your latest weekly recap on your dashboard, and we’ll send you a weekly email as well.

Help your AI Assistant help you better

The more your AI Assistant knows about your household, like your ZIP code, dependents, or employment situation, the better it can help you make decisions that fit your circumstances.
You can add these details anytime on the members page of your household settings, and your AI Assistant will use them to give you more relevant guidance.

Our commitment to privacy

Privacy and data security is our top priority and a promise we will continue to uphold. That commitment extends to every new feature we build, including those that leverage AI.
To help answer any questions you may have about how AI is used in Monarch, we have an article dedicated to the topic here.

Goals, reimagined

We've completely redesigned Goals around a simple insight: saving money and paying down debt require different planning approaches. That's why you'll now see two distinct experiences—save up goals and debt pay down goals—each tailored to what you're actually trying to accomplish.

Save up goals help you build toward what matters most: emergency funds, down payments, vacations, or any other target. Set your amount and timeline, and Monarch will show you what it takes to get there.

Pay down goals are built specifically for managing credit cards, loans, and other liabilities. Compare avalanche versus snowball methods, model different payment scenarios, and see exactly how extra payments accelerate your path to being debt-free.

Beyond separating these experiences, we've rebuilt Goals from the ground up to be more intuitive, more actionable, and more aligned with how you actually manage money.

You'll always know if you're on track

No more guessing whether you're saving enough. Set a target amount and date, and Monarch calculates exactly how much you need to save or pay each month. You'll see your status at a glance—"On track," "Ahead," or "At risk"—and if life changes, simply adjust your contribution, target date, or target amount to immediately see how it affects your timeline.

Flexible funding from any account

We’ve introduced more flexibility in how you allocate funds from your accounts to your goals, addressing a common pain point in the previous Goals experience. Fund one goal from multiple accounts, or use one account to fund multiple goals, all available for easy reference in a new sidebar view. You’ll also have the option for goal balances to update automatically when an account balance changes.

Spend from your goals as you go

Saving for a vacation? Or house projects that you’re chipping away at? You can now spend from your goals, including spending on a credit card. We'll then automatically reduce the goal balance to reflect that spending as it happens.

Coming soon

As we move out of beta early next year, you'll see additional improvements like the ability to re-order goals in your list, more robust transaction linking, and automated rules to make goal management more effortless.

How to get started

Next time you visit your Goals page on web, you'll see an option to update to the new experience. We'll walk you through adding a few details to migrate your existing goals. If you'd prefer to wait until we're out of beta, you can stick with the current version for now.
For additional guidance on how to use the new Goals feature, check out this video!

Equity compensation, now in the mix

If you have RSUs, stock options, or other private company equity compensation sitting in a spreadsheet or in other tools, it's hard to know how it fits in within your full financial picture.
Now, you can add equity accounts directly in Monarch to get an accurate picture of your net worth today and see how future grants will vest over time.
You can add RSUs, ISOs, NSOs, and RSAs directly in Monarch alongside all your other accounts. The new account details page shows what's vested, what's coming, and when, so you can monitor the value and growth of your equity for net worth calculations and cashflow planning.
To get started: Head to the Accounts page (on web), select “Add account,” then “Company equity”. You’ll have the option to upload a document to import equity details automatically, or enter grant details manually. More detailed instructions can be found here.
What's coming: We'll continue to enhance what you can do with Equity Tracking, including enhanced reporting, scenario modeling, mobile support and integration with the new AI Assistant for personalized equity insights.

Introducing: Receipt Scanning

Ever look at a transaction and wonder what you actually spent that money on? The Monarch Extension helps solve that for specific retailers (Amazon and Target) and now there’s a new way to get this level of detail in Monarch for any merchant by simply uploading a photo of your receipt.
With our new Receipt Scanning feature, you’ll just upload a photo of a receipt and Monarch will automatically attach it to the right transaction, complete with detailed notes about what you purchased.
Even better: Monarch can split one generic transaction into multiple, properly categorized ones. That Costco run that shows up as a single $147.83 charge? We'll break it down into groceries, household supplies, and electronics—each categorized correctly so you see a more accurate reflection of your spending.
How it works:

• Upload an image in one of three ways from your mobile app:
  • By clicking on Receipts in your mobile app's left navigation panel
  • From the "+" icon at the top of your transactions page
  • Using the share option from a photo in your photo library (you’ll see a new option to share with Monarch)
• Monarch will scan the receipt, find a match, and split and recategorize as needed. We'll also add details to the notes section and attach an image of the receipt itself.
• If Monarch doesn't immediately find a match, you can leave it as "Waiting for match" and we'll keep searching as new transactions sync. You can also match it yourself or create a new transaction.
• Easily review transactions with scanned receipts using the "Receipt Import" tag
  You can choose to disable automatic splitting from the settings within the feature if you only want notes and a receipt attached.
  Note: digital receipts can also be imported by simply taking a screengrab and following the same steps as above. In the future, we’ll be adding a way to forward email receipts so stay tuned!

What's next

We have a lot planned for next year, all focused on helping you plan what's next with confidence.
One of the next big features you'll see from us is forecasting, and the team is already hard at work on it. This will take you beyond individual goals and help you build a complete picture of your financial future. You'll be able to map out major life transitions, explore different scenarios, and see how today's decisions ripple into tomorrow. Want to know if you can afford a career change? When you might retire? What trade-offs different paths require? Forecasting will help you answer those questions with confidence.
We're building Monarch to be the partner that gives you clarity on where you stand and confidence in where you're headed—whether you're planning for the next year or the next decade.

Original source

Jenna Tunick
Author

Managing money together looks different for every couple. But one thing's universal: when you both have a clear view of your finances, everything gets easier, from everyday conversations to long-term planning.
The reality? Many couples need to see both their personal finances and their household's. That's why we built Shared Views: so you can see yours, mine, and ours side by side in Monarch.

What’s new

Label accounts (and transactions) with an owner
You can now mark accounts and transactions as mine, theirs, or ours (shared). This instantly removes the guesswork around what belongs to who, helping you and your partner clearly see contributions, spending, and progress.

Switch perspectives instantly
Want to see just your spending? Just theirs? Or both together? With new filters, you can easily switch between personal, partner, and household perspectives — across accounts, net worth, transactions, and reports.

Make money check-ins a breeze
Shared Views makes it simple to check in with your partner about money — no guesswork, no workarounds, and no assumptions about whose is whose. Whether you’re reviewing last month’s spending, planning for upcoming expenses, or tracking progress toward a shared goal, these new ways to view your money in Monarch keeps everyone on the same page.

How it works

• Visit the Accounts page where you’ll see a walk-through to assign account ownership.
  • If you haven’t invited your partner to Monarch yet, you’ll want to start there. You can send an invite from your Household Settings page.
• When you assign ownership on an account level, transactions from that account will inherit the same label but can be adjusted individually as needed. You can do this when reviewing new transactions or make it automated using rules.
• Start exploring! Try the new “Owners” filter across Accounts (and net worth), Reports, Cash Flow and Transactions and get a new level of insight about your money, together and solo.

Note: Right now, a single budget is still shared across all household members, though we’re exploring ways to bring ownership into this page too.

Building healthy money habits, together

Shared Views is about more than labels and filters — it’s about making collaboration easier, more empowering, and setting you up for success... together.
By giving each partner clarity into both individual and shared finances, Monarch helps you:

• Have more productive conversations about money so you’re always on the same page.
• Celebrate progress, individually and as a team.
• Build stronger financial habits that grow with your relationship.

Looking for ways to better ways to approach conversations about money? Check out our “Same Page” blog series, filled with conversation starters that you try today over dinner or whenever it feels right.

Original source

What's New

October 16, 2025

What's the deal with the butterfly?

Announcing our migration to monarch.com

Val Agostino
Author

We're often asked, "Why did you name your company Monarch? What's the deal with the butterfly?"
There are few things that represent the idea of transformation as dramatically as a butterfly. One day it's a caterpillar crawling slowly along on its belly, then it goes to sleep in a cocoon and wakes up to a whole new life of freedom as a beautiful butterfly.
We find this metaphor very appropriate when it comes to many people's financial lives.

From crawling to soaring
From crawling to soaring
Often folks feel like they're just crawling along, getting nowhere financially.
However, we see it time and time again: when people understand their finances and adopt new financial behaviors as a result, their lives start to transform rather dramatically. They make different choices about where they spend their money. They start saving more or investing more. They understand how their short-term decisions impact their longer-term outcomes.
The research is very clear:
financial health is more a function of behavior than income.
When people follow the right behaviors over time, their lives transform dramatically and they experience a whole new level of expression and freedom. This transformation may not happen as quickly as it does for the butterfly, but the effect is just as pronounced!
We are committed to doing all we can to help people learn and practice these behaviors so that they can experience this same level of freedom.

Our next step in the journey

Our next step in the journey
We're excited to announce another step along our journey to build the most trusted brand in personal finance: we're "migrating" our services from the monarchmoney.com domain to simply
Monarch.com
.
Nothing changes about your service—although we will have some big announcements on that front soon. It's simply a shorter URL that's easier to type and more aligned with our commitment to financial transformation.

Ready for your financial metamorphosis?

Ready for your financial metamorphosis?
Whether you're still in the caterpillar stage of your financial journey or already spreading your wings, we're here to support your transformation every step of the way.
Visit us at our new home:
Monarch.com
Because every financial transformation deserves a platform as powerful and beautiful as the butterfly itself.

Original source

What's New

August 14, 2025

The Monarch Extension, now supporting Target

The Monarch Extension now supports your Target shopping trips, a new way to track your credit health in Monarch, and more.
Jenna Tunick
Author
Your Target runs, now perfectly categorized in Monarch
We recently launched the Monarch Chrome Extension to tackle one of the most common requests from members: to help sync, split, and categorize Amazon orders automatically. Today, we’ve added Target support to the extension. So whether you're buying groceries, school supplies, or clothes, your Target trips will now be effortlessly tracked and accurately categorized.
The extension will help do the heavy lifting for both your online orders and in-store trips, as long as they’re tied to your Target account. That means:

• Smarter, more precise categorization
• Automatic splitting for multi-item orders
• Notes to remind you of transaction details
  The result? Cleaner budgets, clearer reports, and a lot less manual editing!
  If you’ve already downloaded the extension, open it today and you’ll see the option to connect to Target.
  And if you haven’t used the extension yet, give it a try today to sync and categorize orders from both Amazon and Target.

Track your credit utilization, card by card

Understanding your credit health just got easier. You can now see your credit card limit and utilization rate (the percentage used based on your current statement balance) directly in Monarch.
From your Accounts page and individual account detail pages, you’ll see:

• A utilization bar showing your usage at a glance
• A detailed breakdown of your current balance, limit, and credit remaining (on web, just hover over the utilization bar from your Accounts page)
• The option to manually add or update your credit limit
  Keeping your utilization low is one of the most effective ways to protect your credit score and now you’ll always know where you stand across all your accounts, within Monarch.
  Check out the Credit Cards section of your Accounts page to see where you stand.

Other improvements

• 🔗 A public dashboard for bank connection quality
• 🔗 A public dashboard for bank connection quality

We've launched our new connectivity dashboard where you can see connection health metrics for every financial institution we support. Check connection success rates, how long connections stay active, and average update times—all in one place.
We’ll soon bring this information into the product so that it’s there to help exactly when and where you need it.
Check it out (and for even more context, read more about why we built it and made it public).

✨ Smarter categorization is here

✨ Smarter categorization is here

We’ve made big improvements to how Monarch categorizes your transactions. You’ll notice more accuracy than ever before, including fewer uncategorized items. It also now applies your custom categories automatically and learns from your past edits.
If you see any unexpected categorizations as the new system rolls out, don't worry—as you correct the categorization for any transaction, the system will quickly learn what fits best into your custom categories!

📊 New spending chart visualizations

📊 New spending chart visualizations

The spending widget on your dashboard now has two new comparison modes that help you understand how you’re trending:

• Current vs average month: displays current month spending against your rolling 12-month average
• YTD comparison: provides year-to-date spending vs last year

🔀 Splitting transactions just got easier

🔀 Splitting transactions just got easier

Now, when you split a transaction, it automatically inherits the original category—making the process easier and ensuring more accuracy.

What’s next

What’s next

We’re making great progress on our update to the goals feature, and you’ll continue to see foundational improvements roll out—some of which include refreshed design elements. If you missed it, here’s a look at the improvements we’ve made just recently. Bigger updates on the way include goal forecasting, on/off track status, spending for goals from credit cards, and more.
We’re also excited to deliver on enhanced collaboration features, making it easier for couples to manage money together. These new features will make it easier to view, compare, and coordinate shared and separate finances—so you can have transparency but still easily see what's yours (and even mark some accounts as private if desired).

We’re hiring

We’re hiring

We're hiring for a number of roles at Monarch across product, engineering, marketing, and ops. As you know, we love hiring Monarch members! Check out our careers page to learn more and apply.

Original source

What's New

July 16, 2025

A new level of clarity for bank connectivity

Our new dashboard brings transparency to account connection health metrics, updated daily.

Ozzie Osman
Author

Today, we’re excited to introduce the Institution Connectivity Dashboard —a new tool that lets you instantly check how well Monarch connects to your financial institutions.
While the broader financial ecosystem presents challenges to stable connectivity—ranging from bank-side restrictions to limitations with data providers—we are doing everything we can to deliver the most stable and seamless experience possible. While much of this work happens behind the scenes, today we’re making it more visible.
The Institution Connectivity Dashboard is a big step in that direction: it brings transparency to connection performance and gives you the clarity you need to make informed decisions.

From internal metrics to a member-first tool

From internal metrics to a member-first tool
While working on improving connectivity behind the scenes, we created a series of “health metrics” to help us measure and improve performance across providers (like Plaid, Finicity, and MX) and institutions (for example, Chase, Bank of America, etc). How do we generate these metrics? We look at, in aggregate, how connections are performing from Monarch to each underlying institution through each data provider. This allows us to better understand how best to connect to each institution, detect when problems arise, and provide information to our members when things go wrong.
Over time, it became clear that this information could be just as valuable to our members as it was to us—and even help spark broader change in the industry.
We believe in putting members first, simplifying complex issues as much as possible, and always being transparent. The Institution Connectivity Dashboard manifests those values by providing a clear view of connection quality across three key areas:

• Initial Connection Success – Likelihood of successfully linking your account through a specific data provider.
• Connection Longevity – How long a connection typically stays active before requiring reauthentication or another action.
• Average Update Time – How frequently Monarch pulls in new data, helping keep your financial picture up-to-date.
  The dashboard also supports:
• Connection Popularity – How often a financial institution is linked within Monarch (sorted by most popular first).
• Internal Notes – Any known insights or updates about a specific institution’s connection status.

Why this matters

Why this matters
The dashboard is intended to help both prospective users and current members in meaningful ways:

• Allowing users to make informed decisions before signing up by checking how well Monarch connects to their financial institutions.
• Providing current members insight into connection reliability and help them understand whether an issue is specific to their account or more widespread.
• Enabling current Monarch members to decide whether they will have a better experience by switching to a different data provider.
• Generating industry-wide improvements by promoting visibility into connectivity performance across Monarch and platforms like it, data partners, and financial institutions.

What’s next?

What’s next?
This is just the beginning.
In the near future, we’ll bring these metrics into the Monarch product itself—so if you ever experience a connection issue, you’ll have helpful context right where you need it. We’ll also do our best to help you understand what’s going on when your individual account connectivity doesn’t match with what’s expected for that institution and what other members are experiencing.
We’re also planning to add features like historical connection trends, real-time outage alerts, and easier ways to report issues. We will also continue to improve on and expand these metrics; they aren’t perfect, and may not capture all possible issues today, but the more eyes we have on them, the easier it will be to improve them. With the initial debut of this dashboard, we’re excited to get your feedback and to learn other ways in which you would find the information to be useful.
Reliable bank connectivity is critical to getting the most out of Monarch. That’s why we’ve built a dedicated team focused entirely on improving it. We continue to work on improving connectivity more broadly, as well as building tools to help understand and fix issues when they arise.
Connecting to over 13,000 financial institutions is no small task, but our goal is simple: to make it feel effortless for you. The Institution Connectivity Dashboard is another step forward—providing transparency, accountability, and continuous improvement so we can simplify managing money, together.

Original source

What's New

July 9, 2025

Your credit score, now in Monarch

From tracking your credit score to customizing notifications and moving through the app faster than ever, there's a whole lot of newness to explore in Monarch.

Jenna Tunick
Author

We've just rolled out a number of updates to help you stay more informed, more in control, and navigate Monarch with ease. Read on for details on all that's new in Monarch!

See your credit score, right from your dashboard

See your credit score, right from your dashboard

Your credit score is a key part of your finances, and now you can track it right alongside everything else in Monarch.

A new dashboard widget shows your latest score at a glance, with automatic monthly updates. Once Monarch has three months of history, you’ll also see how your score is trending over time and if your score shifts significantly—up or down—you’ll get a heads-up notification automatically.

What you’ll see:

• A new credit score widget on your dashboard
• Quick and secure setup (you’ll connect your score using our partner Spinwheel)
• A monthly update to your score, with notifications if there are major changes
• Shared visibility across your household (each member of your household can connect their own score)

Set up credit score tracking and see your latest score today.

Note: this feature is available for US members only at this time.

Customize how Monarch keeps you in the loop

Customize how Monarch keeps you in the loop

We’ve revamped the notification settings page to give you more control and clarity, so you can decide what deserves your attention—and how you hear about it. The redesigned settings page makes it easy to fine-tune alerts by channel and toggle them on or off in just a few taps.

What’s new:

• Manage in-app, email, and push alerts in one place
• Toggle all notifications on or off by channel
• Cleaner design and more clear descriptions for every type of alert

Head to your notification settings page and customize your preferences.

A faster way to search and navigate: the new CommandK search bar

A faster way to search and navigate: the new CommandK search bar

We’ve made big upgrades to Monarch’s CommandK search bar so you can move through the app faster and find what you need instantly.

What’s new:

• Search for almost anything in Monarch: categories, merchants, accounts, goals, saved reports, and more
• Find context-aware actions based on where you are in the app (for example, when viewing a transaction, you’ll see the option to “Explain this transaction”)
• Access settings such as light/dark mode
• View a full list of keyboard shortcuts

Give it a try today. From anywhere in the web app, click Cmd+K (on Mac) or Ctrl+K (on PC).

Other improvements

Other improvements

Laying the groundwork for easier goal planning

Early improvements to goals are starting to roll out as we work on larger updates behind the scenes, including target dates, forecasting, and more. Some of the improvements you’ll notice now include:

• Rules can now be used to link transactions to goals with multiple accounts
• Goals are now available as a filter on your transactions list and reports
• Transactions linked to a goal now have a special icon (a “target” symbol) shown in your transaction list view
• Archiving a goal removes it from your budget in future months
• Closed accounts are no longer displayed as options in goal setup
• Plus, we gave goal names and icons a visual refresh on mobile ✨

Clearer guidance for reconnecting your accounts

As part of our promise to provide the best possible experience with account connectivity, we’ve improved how we communicate any connection issues, making it clearer what’s going on and what to do next.

Whether it's re-entering a password, confirming a security prompt, or completing a required action at your financial institution, Monarch will guide you through exactly what to do, so you can get back to seeing up-to-date balances and transactions quickly and easily. You’ll see these new and improved messages right inside the app as well as by email.

Investments

We’ve made a number of improvements and fixes to the Investments experience. Some of the changes you’ll notice include:

• Stocks, ETFs, and crypto holdings now refresh every 5 minutes during market hours
• Manual holdings now support decimal quantities for greater accuracy
• Investment types have been standardized so they match across all parts of Monarch
• Holdings that undergo a stock split now automatically reflect the correct price history
• You can now correct the security if its misclassified (for example: changing "bonds" to "CDs")

Clearing filters just got easier

Easily reset your view when needed with a new “Clear” filters button on both the Reports and Transactions page.

Our Help Center has a new look

We gave the Help Center a refresh to make it simpler to browse and faster to find the answers you need.

What’s next

What’s next

Target will be the next retailer supported by Monarch Chrome extension! Soon, you’ll be able to sync your Target purchases just like you can with Amazon—helping ensure your shopping trips are categorized accurately and automatically.

We’re continuing work on bigger improvements to goals, with future updates focused on helping you forecast when your goal will be completed, allowing you to set target dates, and giving more helpful context on your progress.

We’re designing new collaborative features to make managing mixed finances with a partner feel more intuitive. Expect updates that make it easier to view, compare, and coordinate shared and separate finances—so you can have transparency but still easily see what's yours.

Last but not least, we’re enhancing how hidden transactions work, making sure they are hidden from the transaction list so you can keep gift purchases under wraps and surprises intact.

We’re hiring

We’re hiring

We're hiring for a number of roles at Monarch across product, engineering, marketing, and ops. As you know, we love hiring Monarch members! Check out our careers page.

Original source

What's New

May 6, 2025

Your Amazon orders, perfectly categorized
The new Monarch Extension syncs with your Amazon orders to accurately categorize and split transactions—automatically.
Jenna Tunick
Author
Amazon orders are rarely just one item—so why should they be one category? Whether it's socks, supplements, or shampoo, Monarch can now help break it all down for you so you can do the shopping, and we can do the sorting!
Our new Chrome extension helps Monarch sync with Amazon (and other retailers to come) to better categorize and split your retail purchases—automatically. You’ll now have…

• 🧠 Smarter categorization
• 🧹 Cleaner budgets and reports
• ⏱️ Way less manual editing
• 🗒️ Notes to remind you of the details of a transaction

Here’s how it works

• Download the extension and follow the steps to connect to both Monarch and Amazon.
• Start your initial sync, which will include the last three months. You can sync older orders from within the extension settings.
• Any orders that are matched to transactions in Monarch will be split and/or recategorized as needed. We’ll even add notes with details from your order.
• You can choose to have a new sync occur every 24 hours to pull any fresh orders (just note your browser will have to be open for this to take place).

Based on your feedback, we built the extension to support Amazon first and plan to add additional retailers in the future. Target is next up, but let us know which retailers matter most to you!

We chose to build this feature as a browser extension instead of natively within Monarch largely due to the fact that Amazon doesn’t offer a public API. A browser extension helps us deliver the most reliable experience today, and we’ve designed in a way that can be easily integrated in the future if Amazon does releases an official API.

A few important notes:

• The extension works with Chrome and Chrome compatible browsers including Microsoft Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, and Kiwi.
• While the extension currently supports Amazon US, we are planning to add support for Amazon Canada shortly.
• Refunds are not categorized by the extension at this time, and we are looking into how we might support this in the future.

Additional improvements

In addition to the Monarch Extension, there are a number of improvements that have gone out lately that we don’t want you to miss.

🎁 Give and get more when you share
Know someone who would love Monarch? We’ve enhanced our referral program so you can share Monarch and both get rewarded.
Let friends, family, and even co-workers know they can get 50% off their first year with Monarch through your referral, and we’ll thank you with a $50 gift card when they subscribe. You can earn up to $500 in a year by referring 10 friends!

🔄 Transfer account data
We’ve rolled out a new way to seamlessly transfer transaction and balance history from an old account to a new one — no more CSV downloads and uploads. Now, you’re able to transfer data in just a few clicks! To access the feature, head to the Accounts page on desktop web, click into the account you want to transfer from, choose Edit, and you’ll see the new Transfer data option.

🔔 Notification accuracy
We’ve fixed the logic for notification badge numbers to ensure it matches unread notifications in the app. This is just one of many improvements to notifications that you’ll see roll out very soon.

💰 Continued Flex Budgeting improvements
You can now move money between fixed categories, non-monthly categories, and your flexible budget.
We’ve also added a line for your “Unallocated flexible budget” to make things easier to track. While we recommend keeping things simple by budgeting just at the Flexible level, we know some people prefer to budget individual categories too. This update helps clarify any gaps between your overall flexible budget and what's been allocated underneath it.

✨ Transactions and reports
We’ve made a number of improvements related to transactions and the reports page, including:

• Added the ability to filter for “untagged transactions” (highly requested by those in our Reddit community!)
• Updated bar charts to include an average line
• Added the ability to quickly create a new manual transaction by duplicating and editing an existing transaction
• Enabled rule creation directly from a transaction, with key details like merchant and amount pre-filled. Both this and the ability to duplicate can be found as options behind the three dots from the transaction detail page.

🇨🇦 Canadian address support
We’ve updated the household settings page to include support for Canadian addresses.

Bug fixes

We fixed a bug that was causing issues when typing in the merchant search field.

What’s Next

• Our improvements to the Goals feature is in progress and we’ll be running some prototypes by users soon. We’ll continue to share more updates on Goals progress, we know its eagerly awaited!
• We’re working on bringing Reports to mobile, so you can access them no matter where you are.
• Soon you’ll have the ability to track your credit score within Monarch, bringing more of your financial picture into one place.
• Notifications are getting an upgrade. This includes new notification options and a refresh of the preferences center so that you can be sure you’re getting what’s most helpful and opt out of getting what’s not.
• We’ve got a lot more coming, including a little something for our Android users!

We’re hiring

We're hiring for a number of roles at Monarch across product, engineering, and marketing. We love hiring Monarch members, so if this sounds interesting, check out our careers page.

Original source

What's New

February 26, 2025

Your favorite reports, now one click away

Now you can save your favorite reports for quick access. Plus a number of other improvements!

Jenna Tunick

Author

Reports are one of the most powerful tools in Monarch, enabling you to gather meaningful financial insights—sliced, diced, customized, and visualized in ways that help you make smarter financial decisions. Whether you’re tracking spending trends, analyzing cash flow, or doing a look back at 2024 for tax purposes, reports can help you zoom in to get a visual representation of what matters most.

Until now, you had to recreate reports from scratch each time you wanted to see updated data. Now, your saved reports are conveniently bookmarked on the Reports page, so you can build them once and access them quickly whenever you need fresh insights.

Get Inspired

Need some inspiration for reports worth saving? Here are some favorite reports, crowdsourced from our members:

• Spending trends — a bar chart showing month-over-month spending for specific merchants (e.g., Starbucks) or entire categories like Restaurants & Bars.
• Vacation expense breakdown — a donut chart visualizing how much you spent on hotels, dining, and activities.
• Household financial flows — a Sankey diagram filtered to joint accounts.
• Rental income vs. rental expenses — a Sankey diagram showing how rental revenue compares to property-related costs.
• Discretionary spending trends — a look back at how your flexible expenses have been trending over time.
• Year-end tax reports — a spending report filtered to tax deductible expenses for easier tax prep.

Please note the Reports feature is currently only available on web.

Improved time frame options

We've also expanded date range selections for your custom reports. You can now choose relative options like "This month," “Last year” or "Last 2 quarters", which update automatically when the report is loaded.

Additional improvements

In addition to saved reports, we've shipped a number of updates recently, all based on your feedback.

• 🔗 New institution connection options
  When you no longer want a particular institution to sync with Monarch, you now have a new choice: instead of deleting the connection and all historical transactions, you can delete just the connection. This means Monarch will no longer sync with the institution, but will keep past transactions for reference. You can do this from the Institutions page within Settings.
  This is just one of many things we have in the works to make the experience of connecting or disconnecting accounts more seamless.

• 📅 YTD view
  A top-requested feature is here! You can now see your year-to-date finances on the Accounts page and dashboard widget, giving you a clearer snapshot of your progress for the year.

• 💰 More intuitive budgeting updates
  By default, "Apply changes to future months" is now unchecked when adjusting your budget, giving you more control over how updates apply. You can always change your default option in the Budget page under Settings.

• 📉 Dynamic y-axis scaling in charts
  On the web, we've improved vertical bar charts with dynamic y-axis scaling, ensuring outliers don’t distort your financial trends.

• 🎨 Visual enhancements
  We’ve refined colors and contrast, especially in dark mode, and improved the styling of the spending dashboard widget for better readability.

• 🔎 Flex budgeting summary
  If you use Flex Budgeting, your default summary card on the budgeting page and dashboard widget now highlights your Fixed, Flexible, and Non-monthly expense progress, making it easier to track your spending.

• ⚡Quicker actions on the Transactions page
  On mobile, we've streamlined the Transactions page, separating “Add New” and “Edit Multiple” actions for quicker access.

• ✨Performance enhancements
  You’ll notice faster load times and performance improvements across iOS and Android. On iPad, we improved stability to prevent the app crashing while editing transaction notes.

What’s next

We’ll soon be rolling out a more streamlined process for transferring data when switching your account connection to a different provider. This will make it easier to merge the transaction and account balance history from your old account with the new one.

The long awaited Amazon import functionality is in the works! Soon you’ll be able to connect your Amazon purchases and have transactions automatically updated to the appropriate category (or split into multiple transactions if needed, for accurate categorization.) Stay tuned!

We’re hiring

We’re hiring for a number of roles at Monarch across product, design, engineering, marketing, and customer success. We love hiring Monarch members, so if this sounds interesting, check out our careers page!

Original source

Today we rolled out Monarch’s new look along with product updates to make managing your money even easier.

Monarch has come a long way since we launched four years ago. Monarch’s feature set has expanded significantly across web, iOS, and Android as we work toward our mission of helping people lead richer lives by making better financial outcomes available to all.

While so much has evolved, some parts of Monarch have stayed the same — and we decided it was time for a refresh.

Over the past few months, a small team has been hard at work tackling a number of “quality-of-life” improvements that will make Monarch even more enjoyable to use. We’ve improved information density, boosted color contrast, and improved some of our core features to make Monarch better than ever.

Improvements to Reports and Recurring

Interactive reports

You can now interact directly with all reports and charts on the desktop version of Monarch to dynamically filter your transaction list right on the same page. This has been one of our most-requested features, and it makes it easier than ever to update your transactions. You’ll see your reports update live, without having to jump to another page.

Better visibility for your recurring expenses

Recurring costs are the foundation of your budget — things like your mortgage, car payments, and other essentials that need to be covered first. We’ve revamped the Recurring page and added a handy summary view, making it easier for you and your partner to see what’s ahead and plan your cash flow more effectively.

Clearer Colors and Contrast

An updated color palette

With our updated colors, Monarch keeps its vibrant look while adding a sense of warmth and approachability. We’ve also listened to your feedback: the expanded palette improves contrast, making it easier to scan your budget, read reports, and update transactions.

Improved dark mode

The updated color palette brings a completely refreshed dark mode, making your Monarch experience feel more in tune with the rest of your digital world. And yes, we’ve retired what some of you lovingly referred to as “Navy Mode” 😄

More Room to Operate

More information, less scrolling

We’ve listened to your feedback and tweaked the whitespace in key areas to pack in more information where it matters most. You’ll notice these updates on the following pages:

• Dashboard. We’ve redesigned the dashboard widgets to better utilize space on both desktop and mobile.
• Accounts. We’ve improved information density for the accounts page on desktop, and made each group of accounts collapsible.
• Transactions. We’ve condensed the height of each transaction row on desktop and mobile to bring more into view.
• Budget. On desktop, you can now collapse the income, expense, and contribution sections completely. We also tightened up spacing to bring more of your budget into view.

Updated navigation & breadcrumbs

We’ve given the navigation a refresh in the browser version of Monarch. The sidebar is now functional even when collapsed, giving you more room to dive into your finances. Plus, we’ve added breadcrumbs to detail pages to make getting around even easier.

Our New Logo: Two Wings, One Line

A new logo

We chose the name “Monarch” because the butterfly is an extreme symbol of transformation, and we’ve seen firsthand how better financial practices can transform people’s lives. The butterfly isn’t going anywhere — but like our product, it’s getting a refresh to better represent how we serve you.

• We’ve redesigned our logo to capture the simplicity and ease that comes with bringing all your finances together in one place.
• Our updated logo incorporates this collaborative spirit of managing your finances with a partner, advisor, or coach — it’s now made of two distinct lines that come together, joined in a common purpose.

(We also added a small easter egg: You can now customize the mobile app icon, on iOS specifically)

What's Next

In parallel with everything launched today, we’re continuing to make progress on a number of projects we know are important to you.

Data Connectivity

First thing next year, you can expect a simplified process for transferring data when switching your account connection to a different provider. This will make it easier to merge the transaction and account balance history from your old account with the new one. While we acknowledge this doesn't solve connectivity issues, it will make for a more seamless process for switching providers when those issues arise.

Beyond this, we now have a team fully dedicated to improving connectivity. Our multi-pronged approach includes getting to quicker diagnosis of issues, improved guidance when a disconnection occurs, and enhanced transparency into whether a connection issue is specific to your account, your institution, or on Monarch’s side. We also continue to collaborate with our data partners to improve “troublesome” connections with certain financial institutions.

Goals

We’re revamping our Goals feature to make it even more simple and intuitive for you to plan for your savings goals, big and small. You can also expect to see this launch early next year.

Saved views on Reports

Another highly requested item is the ability to save particular views in Reports so you can get the personalized insights you need more quickly, any time you visit the Reports page. This is in the works and will be available soon.

Get a heads up the moment they are ready by joining our Reddit community or by keeping an eye on our What’s New updates. Thank you again for joining us on this journey. We’re looking forward to all that’s to come in 2025!

Changelog

Here is a full list of the improvements included in this update:

Mobile

• Updated dark mode and light mode color palettes to improve contrast
• Redesigned mobile dashboard cards to improve information density
• Added an income, credit card, and expenses summary to the recurring tab
• Reduced the height of transactions in lists to improve information density
• Reduced the height and gap of the bars on the Cash Flow screen to improve information density
• Reduced the height of settings lists and menus to improve information density
• Redesigned left navigation to more clearly differentiate features and settings
• Added a confirmation step when tapping “Mark all as reviewed” to prevent accidental bulk updates
• Moved the notification bell out of the left menu and into the header to reduce friction
• Added the ability to customize the mobile app icon from settings

Desktop

• Updated dark mode and light mode color palettes to improve contrast
• Reports charts are now interactive and filter the transactions list below when clicked
• Added an income, credit card, and expenses summary to the recurring page
• Added breadcrumbs to detail pages to make navigation easier
• Made the main sections of the budget page collapsible and improved information density
• Redesigned the left navigation so it can still be used when collapsed
• Reduced height of transactions in lists to improve information density
• Added a toggle on the Accounts summary to switch between Total Amounts and Percents
• Made account groups collapsible on the Accounts page
• Simplified the header of account groups to improve information density
• Shrunk the height of the account rows on the accounts page to improve information density
• Simplified chart axis styling to improve visual polish
• Reduced top margin of all modals to reduce the need to scroll
• Shrunk the width of the left navigation and global padding to improve information density

Original source