Import Your Monarch Money Data into Summitward

Summitward now imports Monarch Money balance-history exports. Upload the CSV that Monarch generates in two clicks, and Summitward converts it into a net worth history, seeds your asset breakdown by tax category, and runs its full planning toolkit against your real trajectory: FI progress, Monte Carlo retirement simulation, projections, and financial health scoring.

The importer is built for two situations. If you use Monarch as your daily budgeting and aggregation app, you can periodically export and re-import to keep Summitward's planning models current without connecting a single account twice. If you are leaving Monarch, the import preserves the tracking history you spent months or years building. Either way, Summitward never asks for your Monarch credentials; the entire flow is a file you download yourself and upload when you choose.

Why Your Balance History Should Be Portable

Tracking history is slow to build and easy to lose. When Intuit announced in November 2023 that Mint was shutting down, users had a fixed window to export their data before the March 2024 cutoff. History that was not downloaded in time was gone. Monarch responded by building a free Mint export extension so people could carry their records forward. Summitward's Monarch importer applies the same principle one layer up the stack: the balance history you built in Monarch belongs to you, and moving it into a planning tool should take minutes, not an evening of spreadsheet surgery.

What the Import Does

• Builds your net worth history. Monarch's all-accounts export contains one balance per account per day. Summitward sums the accounts you choose to include, liabilities and all, into a net worth series at the granularity you pick: monthly, weekly, or every daily point. Weekly is the default.
• Seeds your asset breakdown. Using the latest balances in the file, the importer suggests a tax category for each account (traditional 401(k), Roth IRA, HSA, taxable brokerage, cash, and so on) based on the account name. You review and adjust every mapping before anything is saved. The result powers Summitward's tax-aware features, including withdrawal ordering and Roth conversion analysis.
• Handles debt correctly. Credit cards, loans, and other negative balances reduce your net worth history, exactly as they should. They are never added to your asset list.
• Respects incomplete history. If you connected an account to Monarch later than the others, that account has no balances for earlier dates. Summitward will not invent them. Early dates with missing accounts are flagged in the preview so you know which points understate your true net worth.
• Supports re-imports. Upload a fresh export next month and Summitward skips dates you already have, or updates them if you toggle that on. Nothing is written until you confirm the preview.

How to Export Your Data from Monarch Money

Monarch documents its export options in its help center. For the net worth import, you want the all-accounts balance export:

1. Log in to Monarch on the web (desktop, not the mobile app).
2. Open the Accounts tab.
3. Find the summary box on the right side and click Download CSV.

That file contains a daily balance for every account, going back to when you joined Monarch. For deeper history on a specific account, use the per-account export: open the account, select Edit, then Download balance history. Summitward accepts both formats. Per Monarch's documentation, these downloads remain available even after your subscription or trial ends, which matters if you are exporting on the way out.

How to Import It into Summitward

1. Go to Settings, then Import / Export, then Import from Monarch Money. New users can also start from the onboarding screen.
2. Upload the CSV. Summitward detects the format automatically.
3. Review the account list. Uncheck anything you do not want counted (a duplicate account, a car you track casually), and adjust the suggested asset category for each account.
4. Pick your granularity, decide whether existing entries should be updated, and review the resulting net worth series in the preview table.
5. Confirm. The import completes in one step.

The preview shows every entry before a single row is saved, including which dates already exist in your history and which early dates have incomplete account coverage.

What Summitward Does with Your History

A net worth series is the input; the planning is the output. Once your Monarch history is in, Summitward computes your FI progress against lean, safe, and cozy targets, runs Monte Carlo retirement simulations calibrated to your actual trajectory, projects milestone dates from your real growth rate, and scores your financial health against your future liabilities. The asset categories you mapped during import feed the tax-aware tools: withdrawal ordering, Roth conversion ladders, and multi-year tax projections.

Monarch remains excellent at what it does: daily aggregation, budgets, spending categories, and shared household visibility. Summitward picks up the long-range questions, like when work becomes optional and how to sequence withdrawals across account types. The two use the same underlying data, and now that data moves between them with one file.

What the Importer Does Not Do

The scope is deliberate, and knowing the edges will save you surprises:

• No automatic sync. Summitward never connects to your Monarch account and never holds your Monarch credentials. Continuous sync would require exactly the kind of credential access this design avoids. Updating your data is a manual re-import, which for a monthly net worth habit takes about a minute.
• Transactions are not imported. Monarch's transaction export (spending, merchants, categories) is a budgeting dataset, and Monarch is the right place to analyze it. Summitward imports balances only.
• History starts at your Monarch signup. The all-accounts export reaches back to when you joined Monarch, so a six-month-old Monarch account yields six months of history. If you backfilled older balances into Monarch manually, or use the per-account export, deeper history comes through fine. You can also add older entries in Summitward by hand or via the generic CSV import.
• Category suggestions are heuristics. An account named "AMAZON 401(K) PLAN" maps itself. An account named after your employer's old savings plan may need a manual fix. The review step exists because account names are messy; budget thirty seconds for it.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I export my data from Monarch Money?

On the Monarch web app, open the Accounts tab and click Download CSV in the summary box for all-account balance history, or use Settings, then Data, then Download Transactions for transaction history. Individual accounts also offer Edit, then Download balance history. Monarch's help center documents all four paths.

Does Monarch Money export balance history?

Yes. The all-accounts CSV contains one row per account per day with columns for date, balance, and account name, reaching back to when you created your Monarch account. Per-account exports contain that account's full recorded history.

Can I import Monarch Money data into another app?

The exports are plain CSV files, so any tool that accepts CSV can work with them in principle. Summitward reads Monarch's balance format directly: it detects the columns, aggregates accounts by date, and converts the result into a net worth history without any manual spreadsheet work.

Does Summitward sync with Monarch Money automatically?

No, by design. Summitward never asks for your Monarch login and has no access to your Monarch account. You export the file yourself and upload it when you want to refresh your data. Re-imports skip dates you already have unless you choose to update them.

What happens to credit cards and loans in the import?

Monarch stores liabilities as negative balances, and Summitward keeps them that way: they reduce your net worth history on every date they appear. They are excluded from the asset seeding step, since a credit card is not an asset, and the review screen labels them so you can see exactly what is being counted.

Why does my early history look lower than expected?

Accounts you connected to Monarch later have no recorded balances for earlier dates, and Summitward will not fabricate them. Early dates that are missing some of your accounts are flagged in the import preview. If the gap bothers you, exclude those early dates by importing at monthly granularity, or backfill the missing balances manually.

Is my financial data secure in Summitward?

Sensitive financial values, including your net worth entries and account balances, are encrypted at rest in Summitward's database on top of standard infrastructure encryption, and the import flow never involves your Monarch credentials. The file you upload is parsed to build the preview and is not stored; only the entries you confirm are saved.

Will Summitward support YNAB or other apps?

The importer was architected for it: each source needs only a format detector and a parser, and everything downstream is shared. YNAB is the likely next candidate. In the meantime, any tool that can produce a CSV with dates and net worth values works with the generic CSV import today.

Key Takeaways

• One file moves your history. Export the all-accounts balance CSV from Monarch's Accounts tab, upload it to Summitward, and your net worth history and asset breakdown are ready for planning.
• You stay in control. No credentials, no account linking, no background sync. Every account, category, and entry is shown in a preview before anything saves.
• Debt and data gaps are handled honestly. Liabilities reduce net worth as they should, and dates with incomplete account coverage are flagged instead of silently padded.
• Monarch and Summitward are a reasonable pair. Keep Monarch for budgets and daily cash flow, and refresh Summitward with a monthly export for FI progress, retirement simulation, and tax-aware planning.

Related Guides

• How to Track Your Net Worth (Step-by-Step Guide): what to include, how often to update, and how to turn the number into a plan.
• The Complete Guide to Financial Independence: the framework your imported history plugs into.
• Financial Advisor Fee Models: where budgeting apps, planning tools, and human advisors each fit.
• Net Worth by Age: benchmarks to compare against once your history is imported.