121–130 of 677 posts
Sounds like a multi-million dollar business opportunity for a relatively cheap monthly service that automatically cancels services you don't use.
It's bizarre to me just how many people in this country ( especially the ones who can least afford it) simply do not take charge of their financial health. Even in this very thread you can see all kinds of excuses ("it's too hard to log in and check credit card statements every month", "they make you call or chat to cancel so I don't bother", "they should cancel subscriptions automatically if you don't use them", "it…
And frankly, I don't see why the government shouldn't mandate making it easy to unsubscribe.
It's bizarre to me just how many people in this country ( especially the ones who can least afford it) simply do not take charge of their financial health. Even in this very thread you can see all kinds of excuses ("it's too hard to log in and check credit card statements every month", "they make you call or chat to cancel so I don't bother", "they should cancel subscriptions automatically if you don't use them", "it…
Is it really that shocking? People pay a lot for convenience. Not putting effort into managing money is another act of convenience that comes with a cost.
It's bizarre to me just how many people in this country ( especially the ones who can least afford it) simply do not take charge of their financial health. Even in this very thread you can see all kinds of excuses ("it's too hard to log in and check credit card statements every month", "they make you call or chat to cancel so I don't bother", "they should cancel subscriptions automatically if you don't use them", "it…
People tend to act shocked when I tell them my finance app requires me to enter transactions manually and doesn't magically categorize everything. You spend a third of your life working for that money, surely you spend 5 minutes at most tracking how you spend it.
We have allowed businesses to exist whose only really business model is duping customers into a subscription and then making it difficult or impossible to cancel. Just go look at timeshares [1].
I would dearly love to give money to some quality news publications to support their work but I don't. Why? Because I absolutely don't ever want to deal with their subscriptions department should I ever want to cancel.
Ever tried to cancel an Equinox gym membership? I've seen half a dozen sign up constulants standing around at the entrance, someone call up to cancel and being told there's no specialist available.
Cancelling a service should be no more difficult than pressing a button on an app or a website. We passed the CAN-SPAM Act to force compliance in communications for businesses [2]. The same should apply to taking their money.
Speaking of gyms, it's an anti-user business model. The perfect gym customer is one who pays for a membership and never uses it. The more members a given gym can "support", the more profitable it is. If everyone used it 2 hours a day they'd go out of business. Planet Fitness took this one step further and removed their most popular equipment to dissuade people from going and charging so little that people usually can't be bothered to cancel it.
All US cable/Internet start with an introductory rate that quietly gets jacked up over time. You can go through a "cancel dance" to renew that rate every year or so but it's absolutely exhausting to have to deal with this.
VPNs do the same thing. $2.99/month introductory price! Wow! Bargain! It just quietly gets jacked up later on.
This is what government is for.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd2bbHoVQSM
[2]: https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act...
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…
It's bizarre to me just how many people in this country ( especially the ones who can least afford it) simply do not take charge of their financial health. Even in this very thread you can see all kinds of excuses ("it's too hard to log in and check credit card statements every month", "they make you call or chat to cancel so I don't bother", "they should cancel subscriptions automatically if you don't use them", "it…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
I don't really see how this follows. A perfectly reasonable option that doesn't affect your use case at all would be "don't charge a customer who didn't use the service during that period." AWS doesn't charge me for an empty S3 bucket, Netflix shouldn't charge for zero minutes of video watched that month. Simple as! The downside, of course, is that this does mean you can't ride the Personal Responsibility bicycle and…
"Frazzled and overloaded" is not an excuse for not looking at your bank account one time in 6 months or longer. That's just plain old fashioned irresponsible.
If you are at a stage in life where a $10 subscription is hurting, then it stands to reason you should monitor those things.
"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.
It's bizarre to me just how many people in this country ( especially the ones who can least afford it) simply do not take charge of their financial health. Even in this very thread you can see all kinds of excuses ("it's too hard to log in and check credit card statements every month", "they make you call or chat to cancel so I don't bother", "they should cancel subscriptions automatically if you don't use them", "it…
There's a correlation between financial illiteracy and acquiring cripling debt.