41–50 of 677 posts
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.
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.
$100/year, but they don't sell your information or push you to buy other products, and it has dramatically helped communication about money with my wife. I have a handful of friends who also use it and swear by it.
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.
Its so ironic because WSJ is one of those subscriptions...
Glad the FTC is going after this nonsense [1].
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/03/...
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.
There should be a standard interface to pull transaction data without having to rely on a third party as it rapes your privacy.
Notably, this apparently exists in EU.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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…
I have the next month worth of bills and paychecks "below the line" as future transactions, so not only can know what's in my checking account today, but I know exactly, to the penny what will be in my checking account on 18-Feb.
I've in the past found credit card fraud/mistakes within a day of being charged, and have fixed them quickly, before even my next paper statement was printed.
Some friends I know don't have any idea how much is in any of their accounts outside of occasionally seeing a number on an ATM receipt. They might have a budget, but no idea how much all their monthly charges add up to in reality. And yea, they always seem to be forgetting about some subscription or charge. I couldn't live like that--not for me.
"They recognized that getting a new card is one of the rare times you must actively renew your automatically renewing subscriptions, since you have to update the payment information on file with those companies." This isn't true: I've had subscriptions roll over to the new credit card number - and not just for a month or two. Apparently the bank will continue to process them (I'd rather they didn't.)
The bank will "helpfully" tell retail partners the new expiry date, and 3 digit code. It's to help you, supposedly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
They're also difficult to cancel. They gave me a student discount for using my .edu email address, but after awhile I realized I wasn't really using it so I tried to cancel. They work really hard to make that difficult to do.
I have this memory of having to do that to get rid of the wsj after I made the fatal mistake of forgetting to cancel after a trial.
While bits based subs are not quite the same, still holds that if people who don't need that sub any more cancelled then others would probably pay more.