Amanda Barroso

The point being that it takes us like just one big mystery $250 Costco purchase and breaks it down into groceries, household items, electronics.

The goal here is like just to give you a much clearer picture of your spending.

They have a second feature, which I think is worth noting.

It's called a retail sync Chrome browser extension.

So with most of these budgeting apps, not all, but most, you can access them on your desktop or on your phone.

So this would be one that you would download a Chrome extension for when you're operating and you're working on your budget on your desktop.

So this lets users connect their Monarch account to their Amazon and Target account.

So right now it's just those two stores.

So from there, Monarch pulls in orders, your purchase details, itemizes those details, and then recategorizes them accordingly so that your budget and all the reports that you're pulling or whatever reflect the categories you've actually spent on.

So sometimes what will happen, especially with something like Target or Amazon, those purchases will just get funneled into like a shopping category, this sort of like big amorphous thing.

So between those two things, there's a lot of functionality here.

Yeah, it sounds really helpful.

Well, what did you learn about YNAB, Amanda?

I'm glad you asked.

So YNAB is another super popular budgeting app.

It stands for You Need a Budget, for folks who don't know.

So with YNAB, you can split transactions across multiple categories, but you'll need to do the calculations yourself, which is something that this listener was saying was really a pain point.

So you'll take your receipt.

There's a button you can push that says like split it.

And you'll go through each item in your receipt and add it to the categories.