Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 677 posts

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

#51

Post by starik36 »

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…

Ah yeah. The good ole' storage unit scam. They all raise the prices about every 6 months. I just rent a U-Haul for a day and move it to a new place. And it forces me to throw things away that I truly don't need. Over the years, the amount of stuff I have has been shrinking and I have less to move.

Rinse and repeat every now and then.

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

#52

Post by ipince »

crazygringo wrote: post #13
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.

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…

Autopay is evil. I have nothing on autopay.

Instead, I have a monthly reminder to pay my bills every month, with a list of all the bills/sites that need to be paid. There's 11 things in the list, but not all of them have a balance every month. I do this towards the end of the month (instead of at the beginning of the month), so that I can include rent in it too, and pay _everything_. It lets me see whether my spending is creeping up and gives me an opportunity to cancel useless stuff. It doesn't take long (5-30 mins depending on how detailed I'm being).

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

#53

Post by godelski »

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.

It's easy for things to get hidden, especially when changes in already small amounts of money. I'm a bit embarrassed that this happened to me once. My spotify student account ended and it got switched over to premium automatically. Probably got an email somewhere but they also send spam so it likely got misread or filtered. On the bank statement, which it was a payment I was expecting, just not the right amount and it occurs at a similar time of the month as a bunch of other bills.

I think there is a rather easy way that we could solve this in a fairly robust way. It could be a legal requirement that when pricing on reoccurring subscription transactions changes that the user has to log in and confirm the change. The reason I'd actually suggest a legal route is because there's many companies that are highly incentivized to create dark patterns that will enroll people in subscriptions at a low or zero rate and then automatically transfer them to higher or paid accounts. It can happen to the best of us, but I'm more concerned with the not best of us. Personally I'm not a fan of a system that allows the easy extraction of money from people who are not as technically literate (i.e. most people). And I really don't think it is a good system to allow legitimate businesses to employ the same tactics as spammers.

If you read the article you'll find that the cases they talk about are specifically mentioning people who signed up for one thing but got a different thing instead. These are deceptive practices, full stop.

While we're at it, I'd love it if companies could stop sending spam from the same accounts they send important information. This dark pattern successfully teaches people to ignore any incoming email to them and explicitly allows this shit to happen. If contracts change, they should simply require a confirmation of that change. Maybe there's something I'm not seeing, but this sounds like a very reasonable and not very controversial take.

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

#54

Post by jabroni_salad »

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.

with capital one they have a browser extension called Eno that remembers which card is for which domain and autofills it.

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

#55

Post by godelski »

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…

This sounds like it can get a bit overwhelming. I absolutely abhor notifications on my phone unless they are things that need my immediate attention. Email is a particular pain where it is difficult to impossible to differentiate spam from legitimate communications.

I really do wish banks or visa/mastercard would offer virtual card functionality. It really would empower users to have more control over their money and improve security and privacy.

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

#56

Post by jabroni_salad »

b112 wrote: post #27
mfwit wrote: post #11

And when you do try to cancel, you have to chat or call somebody. I'm looking at you SiriusXM.

Thanks for the heads up. I will never try them (buying a new car soon).

Dealers get a commission for converting you, keep an eye on the paperwork.

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

#57

Post by mnw21cam »

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…

My phone goes ping every time any money goes out of my account. Yes, at the beginning of the month I get a slew of pings for mortgage, power, water, etc, but it's worth it. A while back my phone went ping twice and I was phoning the bank within minutes of a couple of fraudulent payments being made - ironically just before the bank sent me a text asking me if I was making the third one.

Having it go ping every time like that is definitely a way to have good knowledge of what recurring payments you are making.

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

#58

Post by thehoff »

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 do this too for all our cards. I still go in everyday to check but the email notifications are great. Every couple years we get a charge that is fraudulent and I always catch it before the bank starts calling (if they even do that).

On topic, its a great reminder to see say the Netflix charge happened and how much. An example is we subscribed to Viki for a couple months and forgot to cancel. Seeing that charge was a great reminder to poll the house if anyone was still using it.

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

#59

Post by [deleted] »

b112 wrote: post #23
massysett wrote: post #12

"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.

[deleted]

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

#60

Post by chucksta »

el_benhameen wrote: post #48
b112 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bank will "helpfully" tell retail partners the new expiry date, and 3 digit code. It's to help you, supposedly.

I get the concern. At the same time, when my card was stolen last year, it was helpful to not have to update my billing info on 8,000 different vendor websites or risk having an account cancelled. I think tying a credit card to an account number versus an account as an entity is becoming somewhat antiquated.

It goes both ways, a couple years ago I had to deal with a scammer who the bank kept "helping" with each new card they issued me. It happened like 5 times before it stopped, nothing I could do.
Post reply on HN