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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

#411

Post by anthomtb »

I do a pretty good job of keeping only the subscriptions I use. Thankfully my S.O. has a severe allergy towards those kind of bills. Did you cancel HBO Max? We haven't watched it in 2 weeks. Are you still using Apple Music? Why do we have three music subscriptions? Is this really the cheapest mobile plan around? It can get naggy but man does it save some $$$.

What drives me nuts are the subscriptions that we actually use but keep creeping up in price. SiriusXM is the worst, I think that one is up nearly 25% in the past couple years. One of those frog-in-boiling-water situations were you don't notice the ~$1/month increase but suddenly the thing is well above your mental marker of what it costs.

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

#412

Post by lazide »

wolverine876 wrote: post #362
lazide wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking free money isn’t asking for handouts. Taking free money is (in this case) someone you know handing you $100 and saying ‘merry Christmas’ or whatever. Sure, you could throw it on the ground and say ‘f you’. But these are existing customers who already give you money and are presumably happy with your service.

> presumably happy with your service The OP is about billions being spent by people who are not happy but haven't unsubscribed, so that seems like a bad presumption.

Seems like a bad presumption to assume they aren’t happy with the service.

Or is taking the standard deduction morally reprehensible too?

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

#413

Post by renewiltord »

anthomtb wrote: post #411

I do a pretty good job of keeping only the subscriptions I use. Thankfully my S.O. has a severe allergy towards those kind of bills. Did you cancel HBO Max? We haven't watched it in 2 weeks. Are you still using Apple Music? Why do we have three music subscriptions? Is this really the cheapest mobile plan around? It can get naggy but man does it save some $$$. What drives me nuts are the subscriptions that we actually…

I use Copilot (which costs $100/y) and review every transaction across all of our accounts. Gives me a lot of piece of mind. It's very fast to audit because the UI is slick and it has simple name matching rules it uses to categorize.

EDIT: The specific app is https://copilot.money/ I use the MacOS and iOS apps though I prefer the Mac app.

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

#415

Post by rqtwteye »

neilv wrote: post #249
tppiotrowski wrote: post #207

I think subscriptions are a "dark pattern" on the web. Often they start after a free trial with minimal knowledge. This could be one category of subscriptions that are not cancelled. Personally on my projects I never auto-renew anything. If you find value you'll take the time to come back and pay again. I wish by default subscription services like Netflix would not charge you for months you don't use the service (I.e…

Try canceling your Amazon Prime. Every order now, I have to be careful not to re-activate Prime, with all the dark patterns. I also have to keep switching the shipping method on an order page, from the paid option, to the free (non-Prime) option. And there's a long spinner (sometimes ~15 seconds) to punish me when I click the radio button. (In the past, they've also hidden a default trial of Prime in the shipping opt…

"Try canceling your Amazon Prime. Every order now, I have to be careful not to re-activate Prime, with all the dark patterns."

I just got myself a month of Prime because of this. And cancelling requires you to go through around 5 screens with buttons "Do you want to cancel?", "Yes, I want to keep Prime" and so on. And the colors of the cancel button are always different. So you have to closely read and understand each button or your cancel attempt will get cancelled.

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

#416

Post by kccqzy »

olejorgenb wrote: post #380
Slow_Hand wrote: post #377

I'm using a service called Subly that keeps track of all of my recurring payments and puts them into a database that I can view at a glance. It shows me which day of the month it renews, how much, and to which card or account it will be charged. This includes my annual renewal fees as well. It then shows me what my average monthly expenditure is. With this I can see that I'm spending roughly $112/month on subscriptio…

How much does it provider over simply taking the time to add the numbers to a spreadsheet? Does it integrite with bankstatements or automate the prosess in other ways?

Exactly my thought. I already review all my credit card and bank statements every month and manually extract important information to my spreadsheet. The once-a-month manual work is to me absolutely worth it to be on top of my personal and household finances.

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

#417

Post by snowwrestler »

ryandrake wrote: post #407
snowwrestler wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish there was some way to do this without handing over the credentials for my entire financial life to a 3rd party—which I refuse to do.

I don't believe you are actually "handing over the credentials" to Intuit or any other 3rd party (unless you consider your computer the third party). When you use Direct Connect, they're stored locally (for example, Keychain on Mac), and when you use Quicken Connect (aka EWC or EWC+), it's more like oauth where you authorize through the financial institution website, and they issue a token to Quicken. What you want t…

Thanks, I must be thinking of Quicken Sync. I’ll look into Direct Connect.

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

#418

Post by kccqzy »

zachwdc wrote: post #67
bratsche wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When I need to cancel something that is hard to cancel, I get a free virtual card from Privacy (privacy.com), then switch my subscription to use the virtual card number, then pause or cancel the card in Privacy.

Then you have the risk of the vendor sending your account to collections and trashing your credit score.

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

#419

Post by babyshake »

Alupis wrote: post #115
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 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. I disagree. I routinely go months in between using some of my various subscriptions - be it Netflix, Hulu, Audible, etc. I would be very upset if they cancelled o…

It should be reasonable to give customers the choice to opt into a setting that auto-cancels if they do not use the service.

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

#420

Post by jimmydddd »

anthomtb wrote: post #411

I do a pretty good job of keeping only the subscriptions I use. Thankfully my S.O. has a severe allergy towards those kind of bills. Did you cancel HBO Max? We haven't watched it in 2 weeks. Are you still using Apple Music? Why do we have three music subscriptions? Is this really the cheapest mobile plan around? It can get naggy but man does it save some $$$. What drives me nuts are the subscriptions that we actually…

Haven't used Sirius in a long time. But back in the day, if you cancelled, they would follow up quickly with a lower offer.
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