Mark has 2 under 2: a 2-month-old son and a 22-month-old daughter. The takeout consumption recently, in his own words, "has been absurd."
He’s a CFP® and has been a financial planner for thirteen years, ever since he leaned hard into the personal planning track in college. He works with about 60 clients at his firm talking cash flow, equity comp, debt, and how budgets realistically take shape. He describes his work as the perfect career fit that blends his analytical rigor with his extroverted personality.
For ten years, his own tool was Mint, from college all the way until it shut down.
He tested pretty much every app on the market and called those experiences "absolutely not for me."
Cash flow first, everything else later
Mark found Monarch through a job interview a few years ago. He was talking to a bunch of wealth management tech companies at the time and didn't end up taking the role. But the conversation and the product experience made an impression. He started using Monarch for his personal finances: “I think it’s one of the most intuitive apps for cash flow and month to month trajectory.”
Would you be surprised to know Mark is a desk-top only Monarch user? He has a strict “no finance on the phone” approach to keep work from creeping into personal time. When he is logged in for his personal finances, it’s only once a month as a retro. It’s a repeatable process that looks just about the same every time. Review cash flow from the last 30 days, clean up and categorize transactions for accuracy. Every so often he revisits his recurring transactions to catch new subscriptions.
On the client side, Mark is in there every single day. It is a core part of his work with his personal finance clients. In fact, he actually pays for many of his clients to have access to Monarch specifically for the cash flow reporting and month-to-month spending trends.
For new clients getting started with Mark, he has them focus first on linking their bank accounts and credit cards. They’ll work together on creating rules and customizing categories to have super relevant data from the start. It’s how he gets on the same page with clients to set realistic expectations about their cash flow. This is an exercise to verify if reported budgets align with actual spending patterns. The cash flow visualization is often eye-opening.
If you couldn’t tell already, Mark’s favorite feature is the Cash Flow tab. He goes there first, drills into a category, and sets up rules from there, both on the personal side and with clients.
The most underrated feature on Monarch though, according to him, is split transactions, "Transaction splitting is a really cool feature especially for cash withdrawals or other things that are not really intuitive. If I took out $1,000 from the ATM but half went to our nanny and half went to the lawn guy, I can actually account for that.”
But also: Target
CFPs have personal lives, which means they have splurge categories too. Mark told us if Monarch were to roast him on a spending habit, it would either be how much they spend on food or shopping. They’ve been relying on takeout since the baby arrived earlier this year, but recently they started trying out a food-prep service. Mostly, it’s the Target runs that add up.
Growing up, Mark worked at a grocery store. He knows the science behind store layouts and understands exactly how end caps, smells, sounds, and colors are engineered to make him spend more. "But I love it," he says. "I'm like, yep, you can get me."
