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Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

wsj.com

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Re: Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

#31

Post by sneak »

xerxesaa wrote: post #16
crazygringo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely not. It was easy to look at statements when they arrived by mail. But with paperless billing, you've got to conscientiously log into your credit card site each month. If you have four cards, that's four logins. Who's going to do that? Not many. The only reason I review my transactions it's because it's easy through an aggregator like Monarch (was using Mint before it shut down). And the only reason I do th…

My strategy here is disable all auto pays and make it a manual ritual to pay my bills at the start of each calendar month. Doing it once a month is easy enough to remember (or put a calendar invite, if you're not able to) and forces me to do a quick validation. In my 20 years of working and being independent, I've never accidentally paid for a subscription longer than one month.

Things I don’t have on autopay frequently get shut off when I forget (or delay) paying for them.

Re: Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

#32

Post by howenterprisey »

nlawalker wrote: post #26
blueridge wrote: post #5

I don't understand, do people not log in online to look at their credit card statements? It takes 5 minutes to skim your transactions, look for suspicious charges, get a quick read on where money is going. There are lots of challenges to actually canceling subscriptions, but not knowing that you're being charged for something every month? Seems absent-minded to me.

I got a great tip here on HN: if your credit card supports email notifications for transactions, set it to alert you on every transaction. On my Citi card the notification is called “Transaction amount exceeds” and is configurable with a dollar amount, which I set to zero. Now I get an email within a minute or two of every charge that includes the amount and payee in the email. It’s a great way to put recurring charg…

I have this set up with push notifications on my phone and that's very helpful as well.

Re: Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

#33

Post by brianleb »

xnx wrote: post #15

It's disappointing but not surprising that no credit card company that I know of provides simple built-in summaries of past 12 month spend by merchant and merchant category. Edit: It looks like my bank has some basic view accessible through a submenu.

To chime in with the others, my Chase card offers this service automatically as well. I think most major credit card companies are starting to offer these services because they want a piece of the pie that companies like Intuit (through Mint, now Credit Karma) are grabbing by just siphoning up financial data.

Re: Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

#35

Post by criddell »

nlawalker wrote: post #26
blueridge wrote: post #5

I don't understand, do people not log in online to look at their credit card statements? It takes 5 minutes to skim your transactions, look for suspicious charges, get a quick read on where money is going. There are lots of challenges to actually canceling subscriptions, but not knowing that you're being charged for something every month? Seems absent-minded to me.

I got a great tip here on HN: if your credit card supports email notifications for transactions, set it to alert you on every transaction. On my Citi card the notification is called “Transaction amount exceeds” and is configurable with a dollar amount, which I set to zero. Now I get an email within a minute or two of every charge that includes the amount and payee in the email. It’s a great way to put recurring charg…

That would mean I would have to turn email notifications on or get in the habit of checking my email every day.

The searchable database of charge history would be nice though. My card number has changed a few times due to data breaches at places I’ve used the card and I don’t think my credit card company’s search is smart enough to follow branches.

Re: Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

#36

Post by inerte »

josefresco wrote: post #22
crazygringo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely not. It was easy to look at statements when they arrived by mail. But with paperless billing, you've got to conscientiously log into your credit card site each month. If you have four cards, that's four logins. Who's going to do that? Not many. The only reason I review my transactions it's because it's easy through an aggregator like Monarch (was using Mint before it shut down). And the only reason I do th…

> Mint before it shut down This was the best, and only feature I used on Mint. Quick glance a couple times a month was an easy way to find unusual charges etc. I haven't found a replacement.

Supposedly this is a selling point of https://copilot.money/ but I do it with YNAB which I prefer overall

Re: Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

#37

Post by happytoexplain »

blueridge wrote: post #5

I don't understand, do people not log in online to look at their credit card statements? It takes 5 minutes to skim your transactions, look for suspicious charges, get a quick read on where money is going. There are lots of challenges to actually canceling subscriptions, but not knowing that you're being charged for something every month? Seems absent-minded to me.

>Seems absent-minded to me.

This is an unrealistic attitude. One can insult people all day, but it doesn't change the fact that society doesn't work properly if we don't account for things humans do, even if it only looks like they are hurting themselves. On one hand, we shouldn't use law to force people to "be responsible for themselves" in petty cases (as opposed to e.g. forcing people to have car insurance), but if enough people commit the same mistake, it's almost by-definition not purely their fault - and on a more objective note, it is certainly pointless to waste time wondering how much of it is carelessness and how much of it is reasonable given what else is going on in people's lives and what their experiences and competencies are like. We simply must give a shit, as natural as it feels to want to just let people deal with things themselves.

Again, one can continue to consider these people mostly at fault or try to get them educated or just make fun of them or hyperbolically lament the fall of society or whatever one's preferred flavor of reaction is, but we also have to solve the active problem. Modern society is too integrated and complex to not give a shit.

Ideally, what I'd like to be able to say is that modern humans are too sympathetic and imaginative to not give a shit.

Re: Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

#38

Post by MOARDONGZPLZ »

quartz wrote: post #30

I recently had my credit card stolen which is a great forcing function to audit subscriptions because you have to dig them all up to update the associated payment methods. After combing through my credit card bills to identify all the recurring charges my conclusion was less that I have too many subscriptions but that cost creep is out of control on them. Ex: I stopped paying attention to my storage unit monthly bill…

Same. New York Times always gets me without fail. They always start at something absurd like $3/mo or $5 for six months, and before you know it I’m auditing my statements and see that I’ve been paying $34.99/mo for the last two years. Repeat ad infinitum.

Re: Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

#39

Post by ghaff »

sneak wrote: post #31
xerxesaa wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My strategy here is disable all auto pays and make it a manual ritual to pay my bills at the start of each calendar month. Doing it once a month is easy enough to remember (or put a calendar invite, if you're not able to) and forces me to do a quick validation. In my 20 years of working and being independent, I've never accidentally paid for a subscription longer than one month.

Things I don’t have on autopay frequently get shut off when I forget (or delay) paying for them.

Yeah, I'm not around or just forget to pay something. For its potential downsides, the fact that I basically don't have to think about a bunch of my ongoing billing (including essential stuff like electricity) is an admittedly first world but nonetheless big improvement over weekly write checks/mail envelopes ritual as I did for years. (Certainly there are incremental levels but I carefully evaluate new subscriptions and don't really have an issue with automatic billing.)

Re: Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

#40

Post by criddell »

rwbt wrote: post #24
marcrosoft wrote: post #3

Use virtual credit cards and privacy.com. It really helps with peace of mind that you can really have a free trial and not worry about it.

How does one get virtual credit cards? I remember some banks like Discover offered them, but I don't see them anymore.

Apple Card does this: https://www.idownloadblog.com/2019/04/01/apple-card-virtual-...

It’s not unique to Apple though. I think it’s this standard from EMVCo

https://www.emvco.com/emv-technologies/payment-tokenisation/

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