Businesses LOVE automatic recurring subscriptions. Once you sign up, it's up to you to cancel, and they get paid until you do. If you forget about the subscription, no problem for them, you just keep paying.
These subscriptions add up. An unused $7.99 monthly subscription is nearly $100/year down the drain. How many of those might you have, and what could you do with that money?
Just knowing what you have is half the battle. There are some services that will go through your bank and credit card accounts to see what recurring charges you have, and offer to cancel them for you. But there's an often-substantial fee for doing it this way.
Here's how I got control of my recurring charges, If I can do it, you can do it!
Download this spreadsheet or get out a pen and paper
Here's a way to get down the information you need regardless of whether you're a pen-and-paper kind of person or a digital kind of person.
I have a printable document here.
Or you can just grab a pad and paper and begin writing.
Write down what recurring charges you remember
Chances are you already have a good idea of what you're paying for.
If you're starting with a pad and paper, write down as many of these for whatever charges you remember:
- The item (i.e. Netflix, gym membership, etc.)
- How much it costs
- How often you pay for it (monthly, yearly, quarterly, etc.)
- What account is charged (Chase credit card, bank account, Venmo, etc.)
- When is it due next
- Any notes about it (like the website you go to if it isn't obvious)
If you are using the spreadsheet, or have printed out the document, just fill it out.
If you don't remember every piece of information, that's fine, we'll fill it out from the statements.
Check your bank and credit card statements for recurring charges
Now it's time to crack out your credit card statements, your bank account statements, your Paypal transaction register — any place that would have recurring transactions.
It's best to have the last 12 monthly statements or a year's worth of transactions. This way you can potentially catch your yearly charges that you may have forgotten about.
Go through your statements and write down the charges to make your list more complete. Also, fill in the information you were unsure about or didn't remember right off.
Check Amazon Subscribe & Save
If you buy things from Amazon, you may have noticed that Amazon bills things a bit weirdly.
You'll see charges on your bank account or credit card statements, but what you bought won't be clear.
We have a number of items we purchase with Subscribe & Save in order to qualify for a discount. The items themselves don't show up on our credit card statement, but fortunately, they're all in one place.
To find the list of items, we log into Amazon, and from the Accounts & Lists menu, we click the link to Subscribe & Save. On the Subscribe & Save page, we select Subscriptions, and they're all there.
Check PayPal and other similar services
In the past, I've had some subscriptions with PayPal.
To find these subscriptions go to Account Settings in the upper right after logging in. Then go to Money, Banks & Cards on the left side, and then scroll to the bottom of that page for the Automatic payments.
Cashapp also allows for recurring payments, so you may want to check there also.
Watch your charges to catch the ones you missed
Occasionally one will get away and then there will be some cleanup to get the charge expunged.
We had a subscription to Kaspersky Antivirus for some time. My wife had thought she canceled it but the subscription record was changed over to a new system at some point, and a new charge showed up.
She caught the charge and immediately took steps to fix the problem. This depended on her being watchful of the charges coming onto our cards. We have alerts set up so that every charge triggers an email (we set the minimum charge amount to zero). When Kaspersky came through we knew there was a problem.
Watch your emails for bills that are coming due
Some services will send you a warning email a few days (or more) in advance. This gives you the opportunity to cancel if you've moved on from that service.
What to do with this information?
Simply knowing about all of your recurring charges goes a long way. If you don't have a handle on these, it may be eye-opening.
You can see how much money is going out the door
You can see how much money is going out the door each month and each year. Knowing this can help with creating a monthly budget/spending plan.
You can take time to consider what's worth paying for
With everything in front of you, you have the opportunity to think about whether you really make use of that service or not. The companies are counting on you not doing this.
A good rule of thumb I come back to for entertainment services like Netflix or Disney+ is the dollar-an-hour rule. For example, our Spotify Premium subscription costs $17/month for our family. We easily listen to our playlists and other music for more than 17 hours per month, so it's a good value for us based on the dollar-an-hour rule.
You now know what to update (or not) when your card expires
Credit cards expire. Often companies will send an email reminder to update your credit card information shortly before your card expires.
Having a list put together with the charged card information lets you know everything that you'll need to update. It also gives you another opportunity to cancel the service rather than keep it going.
(Header photo by Karolina Grabowska)
