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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

#81

Post by JohnFen »

ipince wrote: post #52
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…

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 spendin…

Autopay did more to improve my credit score than anything else. If left to my own devices, I'll forget to pay bills. Autopay prevents that.

It may be evil for you, but for me, it's an absolute lifesaver.

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

#83

Post by guntars »

criddell wrote: post #40
rwbt wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Apple lets you replace your card number with a new one, but it's not quite the same as creating single-use virtual numbers for sketchy businesses.

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

#84

Post by bombcar »

wolverine876 wrote: post #64

The blame falls also on businesses which take money for services they don't deliver. They often know, and otherwise often could know, when subscribers are not using the service. If you're a business, you should earn your revenue, otherwise you are frauds. This particular behavior is little better than taking money and simply refusing to provide service. Don't tell me it's unintentional - you know what's happening and…

The way I see it, if they can register if you're using it, then after a year of disuse (or getting close to it) they should send a "we will cancel this for you" type notices.

If it's business to business, that's more on both sides.

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

#85

Post by bombcar »

starik36 wrote: post #51
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.

My final calculus was adding up what I had spent on storage units, and realizing it was way more than the replacement cost of most of the crap, so I reduced it down to personal momentos only.

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

#87

Post by bombcar »

ryandrake wrote: post #47
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…

Maybe I'm unusually anal retentive about this, but I have every bank account, PayPal, Venmo, both credit cards, every brokerage, 401(k), HSA, IRA, mortgage, everything... in Quicken, which I check every single day. 1. Start Quicken, 2. Hit Update, 3. Get Coffee, 4. Review everything in boldface to make sure it's not a surprise. I have the next month worth of bills and paychecks "below the line" as future transactions…

I used to be that way, now I rarely check anything. No time anymore, and all the software I used to use is not compatible/complicated to setup.

Someday, I keep telling myself, I'll be down to one bank account, one credit card, and that's it.

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

#88

Post by bombcar »

crazygringo wrote: post #73
foobarian wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I used to filter these by different cards, but now they're all on the Apple Card. :(

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

#89

Post by dave78 »

mfwit wrote: post #11

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

I had XM (before the Sirius merger) and cancelled it >10 years ago. The process was difficult enough that I would never even remotely consider signing up for them again. If it had been more painless, I may have resubscribed at some point. Instead, they've completely poisoned their brand with me permanently.

I've heard enough horror stories about other classes of subscription-type things (gym memberships, newspaper subscriptions, etc.) that I don't even consider signing up for those - entire industries that I write off because of bad behavior when it comes to cancelling subscriptions.

I always wonder if companies think through the consequences of their aggressive "retention" efforts.

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

#90

Post by bombcar »

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…

Apple Card (and some but not all cards you add to Apple Wallet) pop up a little notification every time they're charged.

It can be nice, but you might miss the nighttime ones.

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