Budgeting with N26—helping you manage and save your money

Budgeting is the process of making and preparing your own spending and savings plan for the future. This allows you to think ahead, organize your plans and know in advance if you’ll have enough money to do what you like in the coming months or years.

It’s very important to budget as it helps keep your finances in order—so you can spend money on the things that matter most to you, while avoiding any financial stress or debts.

N26 has many saving and budgeting tools to help you to organize your personal finances. Shared Spaces can help you save and split expenses with family and friends, and you can also automate recurring money transfers between spaces and your main account with Rules. The N26 app also offers Insights, a feature where you can see your monthly spending split by category, so you’ll know exactly where your money is going.

Each space created with Spaces is a sub-account that sits parallel to your main N26 account. They hold your money but can’t be used for spending or transactions.

N26 You and Metal users can have up to 10 additional spaces active at once. You can create, edit and delete spaces as often as you like.

Shared Spaces is a new shared sub-accounts banking feature that sits within N26 Spaces—it’s accessible via the N26 app and web app. It lets you create a sub-account and share it with up to 10 other N26 users. Shared Spaces lets you invite your partner, friends, roommates and family as participants to add and spend together from the same Spaces sub-account. Each participant can easily transfer money between the shared space and their own N26 account, and even keep track of all transaction activities just by viewing the space details.

With traditional joint accounts, two people open the account together, and then have equal legal ownership of it. The difference with Shared Spaces is that the N26 premium user who creates the space is the sole owner of the space. This means that anyone the owner invites to join is merely being given ‘Power of Attorney’ which allows them to access and/or contribute to the funds within that space.

Shared Spaces is the perfect solution for those looking for a simple, flexible and secure solution for handling a collective pool of money. N26 premium customers can save and share expenses with up to 10 people per shared space. You can do this with anyone you know and trust, and that has an N26 account—this includes partners, family members, friends, roommates and colleagues. You can also remove a participant at any time. Read more about how it works here.

Using the ratio 50/30/20 is always a good rule to start with when determining your budget. On a tight budget, try to set aside 50% for the essentials, 30% for the additional treats and comforts, and 20% toward savings or an emergency fund. If this split is still too tight to live on, try to reduce the treats and comforts until you’re in a better financial position.