Savings goals in Monarch help you set aside money for what matters most, whether that’s an emergency fund, a vacation, or a future home. With save up goals, you get a smart, flexible way to plan, track, and move money toward your targets.

Coming from old Goals? Check out Introducing Goals 3.0 for more information on what’s changed and how to migrate your existing goals!

Table of Contents

• What Are Save Up Goals?
• Adding a Save Up Goal
• Managing Your Save Up Goals
  • Tracking goal progress
  • Assigning goal accounts
  • Automatic balance adjustments
  • Available, allocated, and over-allocated funds
  • Using fund allocations
  • Spending from a goal and reconciliation
  • Budgeting with goals
• Related Articles
• FAQs

What Are Save Up Goals?

Save up goals are dedicated “buckets” for your money to allow you to save for your most important life events.

Each goal can have a Target amount, Target date, and Monthly budget contribution, giving you a clear plan to reach your goal.

With savings goals, you can:

• See progress toward your savings target and track statuses like on track, ahead, or at risk.
• Move money easily between accounts and goals using fund allocations, or link Income and Transfer transactions directly to goals for a detailed record of exactly which transactions are funding your progress.
• Choose whether spending reduces goals progress — you’ll turn this on for goals you want to refill (like an emergency fund), and off for one-time spending goals (like a vacation).
• Manage all your contributing accounts globally, rather than per goal.

Adding a Save Up Goal

1. From the Goals page, select Add goal.
2. Choose your goal type — e.g., vacation, down payment, or emergency fund. Click Continue. Pro tip: On web, you can create more than one goal with different types at a time!

3. Enter an optional Target amount and Target date and choose whether Spending reduces goal progress:

   • Turn this on for goals you want to replenish (like an emergency fund)
   • Leave it off for one-time spending goals (like a vacation)

   Click Continue.

4. Add funds you already have saved (if applicable) by selecting the account that holds those funds and entering the amount. Click Continue.
5. Set your Monthly planned contribution and click Continue to finalize. If needed, you can edit the goal targets to help your goal stay on track.
6. Click View goals to return to the goal page.

Tip: To see your goal’s status (on track, ahead, or at risk), you’ll need to set all three data points: target amount, target date, and monthly contribution.

Managing Your Save Up Goals

Once a save up goal is created, you can track your progress, manage connected accounts, move funds in or out, spend from the goal, and budget for it.

Tracking goal progress

Each goal includes a visual timeline that helps you see where you stand. You may not see all of these indicators depending on how you’ve set up each particular goal.

• Green line: Goal balance
• Purple line: Target amount
• Black line: Spending from the goal
• Dotted projection line: Your projected growth or savings path

Statuses (available only if you’ve entered a target date, amount, and monthly budget contribution):

• On track: You’re pacing to reach your goal by your target date
• Ahead: You’re expected to reach your goal early
• At risk: You’ll miss your goal unless you adjust your plan
• Complete: You’ve met your goal

Tip: Adjust your monthly contribution or target date anytime to see your projection update instantly.

Assigning goal accounts

You can select which accounts you want to have available to link to your goals.

1. From Goals, click Edit goal accounts.
2. Toggle an account on to make it available for goals.
3. Toggle Use entire balance and future activity if you want that account to fully power one goal.
   1. If this is selected, every time the account balance changes, you’ll see that reflected in your goal balance, as well as see a goal withdrawal or contribution to automatically reflect the account balance change.
   2. This may be useful for goals such as retirement savings, where you want the goal to always stay in sync with your retirement accounts.
4. Toggle accounts off anytime — Monarch will help you move funds back to “available” status first.

Automatic balance adjustments

When an account is set to "Use entire balance and future activity," Monarch will create automatic Adjustment events in the goal whenever the account balance changes. You'll see at most one Adjustment per account per day, summarizing all balance changes for that day.

Adjustments are always excluded from your budget — they exist only to keep your goal balance aligned with your account balance.

If you want contributions to your account to appear in your budget, link the underlying Income or Transfer transactions to the goal instead. This pairs especially well with fully allocated accounts: your intentional contributions show in the budget as linked transactions, while market-driven balance changes show as Adjustments and stay out of the budget.

Note: If you were in the Goals beta earlier, this behavior has changed. Adjustments are now always excluded from the budget regardless of previous settings.

Available, allocated, and over-allocated funds

You’ll see these three terms relating to the accounts you’ve linked to goals:

• Available: The amount of money in your goal-enabled accounts that hasn’t been assigned to a goal yet.
• Allocated: The amount already contributed to one or more goals.
• Over-allocated: When your goal contributions exceed your real account balance.

Monarch alerts you if you’re over-allocated and helps you adjust using a fund allocation.

Using fund allocations

Fund allocations are the simplest way to keep your goals aligned with your real account balances, and let you move money between your accounts.

You can:

• Add money to a goal (contribution)
• Withdraw money from a goal
• Change the allocation date to take place in the future or past
• Exclude an allocation from your budget
• Delete a allocation after creation (we all make mistakes!)

To create a fund allocation:

1. Select Allocate funds from the Goals page or an individual goal.
2. Choose the goal or account for the From and To fields, or tap the arrow icon to reverse direction.
3. Enter the amount to move.
4. Review the available balance and confirm.

Hint: You can’t allocate more than what’s available in the account or goal; Monarch will alert you if you try.

Transaction linking

You can link income and transfer transactions to any save-up goal — manually from the transaction drawer, or automatically via rules. Learn more about all the ways to move funds in and out of goals.

Spending from a goal and reconciliation

In many cases, you’ll make a purchase using an account that isn’t directly funding your goal. For example, you might have saved for a vacation in your savings account, but booked your flights with a credit card.

You can link that credit card expense to your vacation goal, then select the funding account — in this case, your savings account — that you’ll use to cover the expense.

This step ensures your data stays accurate and realistic. It prevents your Available for goals balance from appearing higher than it actually is while the credit card payment is still outstanding.

Tip: Think of reconciliation as “settling up” between your spending and your savings. It keeps both your real-world accounts and your goal balances in sync.

Budgeting with goals

When you create a goal with a monthly budget contribution, it automatically appears in the Contributions section of your Budget as a line item under Save Up Goals.

You can:

• Edit this month’s contribution only
• Apply changes to all future months
• Use the Budget Forecast tab to budget future months.

Note: Budget amounts for past months don’t change automatically. You can edit them manually if needed.

Archiving goals

If you’ve reached a goal, paused progress, or simply want to clean up your Goals view, you can archive a save up goal instead of deleting it.

Archiving this goal will:

• Withdraw all currently available funds

• Retain all transaction history

• Remove it from your future budget

• Hide it in places such as allocations and filters

This can be undone at any time.

To archive a save up goal:

1. Open the goal you’d like to archive.

2. Select Manage.

3. Choose Archive goal.

To unarchive a goal:

1. From the Goals page, click "Show archived savings goals" at the bottom of the goals list.

2. Open the archived goal.

3. Select Unarchive goal under the Manage button to restore it to your active goals list.

Archiving is a great option if you want to keep your history without permanently removing a goal.

Related Articles

• Introducing Goals 3.0
• Using Pay Down Goals
• Moving Funds In and Out of Goals

FAQs

• Why is Goals in public beta, and what does that mean? Why not make it part of Labs?
• Why don’t I see a goal status?
• Can I use rules to link transactions to my goals or automate fund allocations?
• How do I link a transaction to a goal?
• How does “Spending reduces goal progress” work?
• Why do I need to “reconcile” when spending from a goal on a credit card?
• Can I link my crypto account in Goals?
• Why can’t I add a target date to my retirement or education goal?
• Can Goals account for investment growth or interest, like brokerage or retirement accounts?
• Can I use manual holding investment accounts in Save Up Goals?
• Can I reorder my goals?

Why is Goals in public beta, and what does that mean? Why not make it part of Labs?

Goals 3.0 is in public beta because it’s ready for real use, but still evolving.

You’ll find that this version of Goals is already rich with new functionality, smarter tracking, and design improvements. But there’s more to come, and public beta lets us gather your feedback as we finish building out the full experience.

Unlike Labs features, which are more experimental, public beta means this version of Goals is stable and supported — just not yet final. Beta improvements are shipping regularly and the experience will continue to evolve.

If you’d rather wait for the complete rollout, that’s perfectly fine too. The full experience will be available early this year, once all planned features are released.

Why don’t I see a goal status?

Statuses only appear when your goal has a target amount, date, and monthly budget contribution.

Can I use rules to link transactions to my goals or automate fund allocations?

Yes! You can now use rules to automatically link Income and Transfer transactions to a save-up goal. This means recurring transactions — like a monthly transfer to your savings account — can be linked to the right goal automatically, without any manual work each month.

To set this up, head to your Rules page. Note that any goal-linking rules you had set up in the previous version of Goals won't carry over automatically, so you'll need to recreate them.

Current limitation: Linking expense transactions via rules isn't supported yet. You can still link expense transactions manually from the transaction drawer.

How do I link a transaction to a goal?

You can link income and transfer transactions to any save-up goal directly from the transaction drawer. Open the transaction, and you'll see an option to link it to a goal. Linked transactions appear in your goal's activity and count toward your budget actuals for that goal.

You can also automate this with rules — see the FAQ above for details.

For a full guide on all the ways to move money in and out of goals, see Moving Funds In and Out of Goals.

How does “Spending reduces goal progress” work?

• Toggle on: Spending lowers your saved total (ideal for emergency funds).
• Toggle off: Spending doesn’t reduce your progress (ideal for planned one-time use).

Why do I need to “reconcile” when spending from a goal on a credit card?

When you spend from a goal, you’re using funds you’ve saved in specific accounts. If you make that purchase on a credit card, those funds aren’t automatically used — so reconciliation helps you move the money from your linked account to pay off that expense.

This step keeps your goal balance accurate and your real accounts aligned.

Can I link my crypto account in Goals?

Not yet, but we're exploring this for a future update!

Why can’t I add a target date to my retirement or education goal?

Currently, goal status, projected timeline, and recommended monthly contribution are driven by three key variables: target amount, target date, and budgeted monthly contribution. While this works well for most savings goals, it's not accurate for goals that rely on accounts with growth or interest rates. 

Since we don't yet support those rates, the status, projected timeline, and recommended monthly contribution for these types of goals would be inaccurate if we allowed target dates to be added. As a result, those goals won't show a status or recommended monthly budget at this time. We've also limited the timeline projection for these goal types, so when viewing retirement or education goals, the timeline will only show past activities.

Can Goals account for investment growth or interest, like brokerage or retirement accounts?

Not yet, but it’s coming! Goals currently track progress based on your contributions, target amount, and target date, without factoring in investment growth or interest.

We’re developing long-term forecasting tools that will incorporate account growth rates and performance, so your projections and goal statuses reflect a fuller picture of your financial progress.

Can I use manual holding investment accounts in Save Up Goals?

Yes. Manual holding investment accounts are supported in Save Up Goals and should reflect the correct balances when used toward goal progress.

Because these accounts rely on security prices rather than direct cash balances, updates to their value may take some time to appear in Goals. In some cases, it can take up to 4 hours for security price changes to be reflected in your goal balance and Available for goals amount.

Can I reorder my goals?

Yes! Just drag and drop them into the order you'd prefer.