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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

#71

Post by scruple »

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.

My wife and I review CC and bank activity every 2nd Sunday. It's part of our budgeting. We both stubbornly refused to take our finances seriously early in life, before we met. By the time we had met, we had both crawled our way out of CC debt and were both independently taking it Seriously. We combined our finances pretty early in our relationship, like before year 2. We used to "meet" once every month to discuss this stuff but since having kids we've pushed it to two weeks because it is, in our experience, so easy to go overboard if you're not regularly reminding yourself.

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

#72

Post by peruvian »

godelski wrote: post #55
nlawalker wrote: post #26

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…

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…

That's the point. Try it out for a month, get overwhelmed by your expenses, then cut back as you learn about them. After that month, turn the email notifications off and make a habit of checking the website every day or every so often.

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

#73

Post by crazygringo »

foobarian wrote: post #66
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…

Yes and then you log in and see: Apple $4.99 Apple $1.99 Apple $14.99 Apple $4.99 Apple $2.99 Apple $9.99 good luck!

Ha! I was literally dealing with that exact issue last week as I was doing my Mint to Monarch migration.

And thinking I'd to categorize my transactions as AppleCare+ vs software vs gaming vs cloud storage vs streaming, for budgeting purposes.

And then just kind of gave up. Apple seriously needs to put more detail in their transaction line, although I guess they can't always when they combine things in a single charge. But even just different merchants would help between iCloud, Apple Store, App Store, and Apple Services. Or something.

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

#74

Post by scruple »

godelski wrote: post #55
nlawalker wrote: post #26

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…

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…

Alarm fatigue [0] is a very real phenomenon that I am sure (potentially, depending) translates to people in their everyday lives somehow, too. I personally disable notifications for practically everything except messages and weather on my phone. Anything else, I have to check it manually. I do get email notifications about charges to my CC, though, and I tend to review them fairly quickly because I check my email a few times a day.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue

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

#76

Post by _rs »

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.

Citi still offers it

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

#77

Post by JohnFen »

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 takes 5 minutes to skim your transactions, look for suspicious charges, get a quick read on where money is going.

If you use your credit card heavily, then this takes a lot more than 5 minutes. Keeping the CC usage light in order to make it easier to manage is important to me, and a key part of that is to avoid recurring charges as much as possible.

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

#79

Post by crazygringo »

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.

Yup, I've learned that lesson as well.

You go on vacation and bill pay day was in the middle of it. Or you're just busy and forget to move the calendar reminder to tomorrow. Or you get through half of them and get interrupted and forget you didn't finish.

I trust autopay far more than I trust myself!

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

#80

Post by francisofascii »

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.

Don't disagree. Many of my charges are some vague Amazon charge that my wife made, which could be a product delivered, or a subscription. So Amazon subscriptions is another place to check. It would take time to match up each charge to the actual order.
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